Foehn's Technical Director, James Passingham, attended the Unified Communications 2009 Exhibition in London last week and took the opportunity to listen to a keynote from Tristan Denenhardt at Digium.

Passingham believes Digium's Asterisk platform is a powerful enabler to Unified Communications (UC). "Because Asterisk is built on open source, it is easy to integrate to other communications systems and it is easy to modify, making it the ideal platform for UC."

"With the broad availability of commercially supported versions, any perceived risk associated with open source software is removed. We always implement commercially supported Asterisk Business Edition on industry standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example," he said.

With proprietary products (Cisco, Avaya, Nortel), creating true UC relies on their integration expertise which becomes expensive.

Digium was listed in the Visionaries section of Gartner's Majic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony in August 2008.