System information

Standards Compliance
In the past few years, it has become clear that standards evolve at such a rapid pace
that to keep up with them requires an ability to quickly respond to emerging technology
trends. Asterisk, by virtue of being an open source, community-driven development
effort, is uniquely suited to the kind of rapid development that standards compliance
demands.
Asterisk does not focus on cost-benefit analysis or market research. It evolves in re-
sponse to whatever the community finds exciting—or necessary.
Lightning-Fast Response to New Technologies
After Mark Spencer attended his first SIP Interoperability Test (SIPIT) event, he had a
rudimentary but working SIP stack for Asterisk coded within a few days. This was
before SIP had emerged as the protocol of choice in the VoIP world, but he saw its value
and momentum and ensured that Asterisk would be ready.
This kind of foresight and flexibility is typical in an open-source development com-
munity (and very unusual in a large corporation).
Passionate Community
The Asterisk-Users list receives over three hundred email messages per day. Over ten
thousand people are subscribed to it. This kind of community support is unheard of
in the world of proprietary telecommunications, while in the open source world it is
commonplace.
The very first AstriCon event was expected to attract one hundred participants. Nearly
five hundred showed up (far more wanted to but couldn’t attend). This kind of com-
munity support virtually guarantees the success of an open source effort.
Some Things That Are Now Possible
So what sorts of things can be built using Asterisk? Let’s look at some of the things
we’ve come up with.
Legacy PBX migration gateway
Asterisk can be used as a fantastic bridge between an old PBX and the future. You can
place it in front of the PBX as a gateway (and migrate users off the PBX as needs dictate),
or you can put it behind the PBX as a peripheral application server. You can even do
both at the same time, as shown in Figure 27-1.
582 | Chapter 27: Asterisk: A Future for Telephony