Asterisk Appliances Continue to Explode On-Scene
mjgraves | June 29, 2008The trend in new offerings of Asterisk appliances continues unabated.
On a VUC call a couple of weeks ago Dean Collins & Co. detailed the VDEX-40 from Technoco, with The Amanda Company providing US distribution.
That conference call was great (hear it now if you like) with lots of detail about the hardware, software (a Druid variant) and target market. To the extent that VUC includes some very technical people, including resellers, and met the apparent demands of the group, it appears that the device has a bright future. It features a dual processor hardware design setting it apart from others, as well as an attractive price point. Dean certainly knows what he’s doing so I expect we’ll be seeing more from them as time goes by.
This week I heard about another new offering from Toronto-based Jazinga. This I learned about by way of Alec Saunders blog & podcast. That call is also available for download.
Their literature is light to technical details, but what is there seems solid. Since all these devices are Asterisk in the core they are differentiated on the basis of hardware flexibility & middleware/GUI solutions. It would not surprise me at all to find that Voiceroute have their fingers in all these offerings to some degree. The end-point auto-provisioning described by Jazinga sounds really familiar.
Some time ago Cory Andrews wrote a post giving a short overview of the Asterisk Appliance market. Since then there have been three or four new devices offered in just a few short months. It certainly seems like it’s about time for someone to get some hardware in-hand and perform a comparative review.
It seems like a great time to be an Asterisk VAR.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the email.
The launch of the vdex-40 has been great. Hopefully people will listen to the call because there is a lot of information in there that will help out Asterisk VAR’s.
TAA has been around for 20 years as a wholesaler to the telecoms industry so they have heaps of support for VAR’s.
The vdex-40 appliance is a great unit for smaller than 30 extension offices. This appliance is also the first asterisk appliance ever to have dual cpu’s and with the onboard codec and hardware based echo cancellation you know your clients are going to get the very best in audio quality.
We setup a forum for customer/reseller questions so feel free to post dealer questions at http://www.taa.com/forum
Cheers,
Dean Collins
P.S. I’ve never come across Jazinga before your email but according to this page http://www.jazinga.com/technology.html#3 it looks like it’s Freeswitch based NOT asterisk based.
Dean,
If you listen to Alec Saunder’s podcast they actually say that it’s Asterisk based now, but has been tested with Freeswitch as well. Perhaps their marketing collateral is a little out of sync with their deliverable device?
Michael
Hello,
Just to clarify some possible misconceptions, we have no affiliation with Voiceroute. Among other things, we have designed our own middleware and GUI which works well with both Asterisk and Freeswitch as the underlying telephony media and signaling engine. The hardware appliance we currently are offering is based on Asterisk. Hope this helps.
That’s good to know! Thanks for clearing up my misconception.