2007-02-05 - Digium changes Executive Leadership
Digium has announced a big move in its executive leadership as founder and VoIP technology leading light, Mark Spencer, shifts over to CTO to make room for Danny J. Windham, former President, COO and Director of ADTRAN. Spencer is going to remain as Chairman and also become the CTO for Digium, allowing him to focus more on technology development. Digium is the company that fosters the Asterisk open source PBX platform and sells and builds commercial products and services based around and upon Asterisk. ADTRAN is a highly successful network access equipment supplier, with a long history and a wide range of products for service providers, particularly in the 'last mile' closest to the customer.
The reasons behind the change become more apparent when the second executive announcement is revealed: Steve Harvey, former VP of Channel
These two changes herald a clear shift toward emphasizing sales to business, and big business in particular. But they also allow the company to focus more clearly on technological extensions and improvements to the core product and the core Asterisk platform. Spencer said, "It was an easy decision to bring Danny to Digium. His operational experience will allow me to focus more time on the customers and the technologies that will accelerate Digium and Asterisk in a way that will benefit both the community and Digium customers."
In a press release, Digium said that '
It is also important to point out that ADTRAN has an equity interest in Digium, so the switchover is not perhaps as unexpected or surprising as it might seem.
But what does it all mean?
Two things. First, Mark Spencer is essentially the founder of the open source VoIP movement. Asterisk is without a doubt a big success and Digium is starting to get real traction as a PBX supplier. It is a very good time for Spencer to turn back to the platform and push it to another level of development. Asterisk (and Digium) has been successful in the small to small/medium business market. But it has NOT been successful in breaking into the enterprise market where SLAs and guaranteed performance and support become much bigger issues. A more scalable Asterisk platform that is more secure and more robust would go a long way toward making an enterprise version of Asterisk a reality.
Second, Digium needs to take its sales, marketing and general approach to business to another level if it is going to go up against industry giants like Avaya, Toshiba, Mitel, Nortel and especially Cisco. That means a hardcore business team and hopefully the new executives will give them that.
And it all means one more thing – the open source PBX market is for real – if anyone doubted that anymore.
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