Asterisk Advisory Council formed

 
For Immediate Release

Digium Forms the Asterisk Advisory Council 

Council to Participate in Managing the Asterisk Open Source Telephony Project


Huntsville, AL   (April 19, 2006)   Digium Inc., the creator of Asterisk(TM) and pioneer of open
source telephony, today announced the formation of the Asterisk Advisory Council. The Council was
developed to respond to the increased interest and participation in the Asterisk open source
telephony project. 

Composed of five experienced Asterisk community contributors, the Council will assist in the
management of the Asterisk open source telephony project. Responsibilities of the council include
the selection and supervision of community developers, management of release cycles, and
maintenance of Asterisk contributions, among other duties. 

"As the Asterisk market continues to grow rapidly on a daily basis, we saw the need to expand the
team managing the open source project," said Kevin Fleming, co-maintainer of Asterisk and senior
software engineer at Digium. "By identifying these key community members to participate in our
council, we can ensure that the project continues to add innovations and improve without any
delays."

The following members have been appointed to the council:

 	Brian Capouch, Assistant Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at Saint Joseph's
College: Capouch has integrated Asterisk with a number of other processors including home
automation, network monitoring, camera-based security, and the openWRT distribution of Linux. He
teaches a college course on VoIP, has presented at a number of industry conferences, and is working
on a forthcoming book on Asterisk to be published by Addison-Wesley.

 	Olle E. Johansson, Asterisk Developer, consultant and Evangelist, founder of Edvina AB, Sweden:
Johansson has contributed to the SIP channel among other parts of Asterisk, worked as a bug marshal
and has written documentation on the software and the Asterisk wiki. He is also one of the founders
of Astricon - the Asterisk conference, and regularly performs Asterisk training sessions. 

 	Tilghman Lesher, Developer for VCCH, Inc., a leading provider of innovative solutions based on
open source software: Lesher has contributed a large amount of code to the core of Asterisk and is
the author of a number of applications and dialplan functions.  He has been programming for over
twenty years, with eight years of professional experience. 

 	Jeremy McNamara, Founder of The NuFone Network, the first Asterisk-based Inter-Asterisk eXchange
(IAX) provider: McNamara has been working in all aspects of the telecommunications industry for
more than nine years and has extensive experience with the development, testing and deployment of
Asterisk-based solutions.

 	John Todd, Tello Corporation: Todd comes from an IP networking background, having worked in
several large ISPs, ITSPs, and application service providers. He is currently developing
next-generation network elements and systems, some of which involve integrating Asterisk with
proprietary systems for customers and providers. Todd is also an active participant and speaker at
various VoIP forums and conferences. 

Details of the Council's organization, membership, management policies, decisions and current
projects will be available on www.asterisk.org. 

About Digium
Digium is the original creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the industry's first open source
PBX and Asterisk Business Edition, the professional-grade version of Asterisk. Used in combination
with Digium's PCI telephony interface cards, Asterisk offers a strategic, highly cost-effective
approach to voice and data transport over IP, TDM, switched and Ethernet architectures.

Digium provides quality hardware and software products that enable telephony applications including
legacy PBX, IVR, auto attendant, next generation gateways, media servers and application servers.
Digium also offers a full range of professional services including consulting, technical support
and customer software development services. 

About Asterisk
Code for Asterisk, originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium Inc., has been contributed to from
open source software engineers around the world. It supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the
handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces, and VoIP packet protocols
such as IAX, SIP and H.323. It supports US and European standard signaling types used in business
phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next-generation voice-data integrated networks and
existing infrastructure.


The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other
trademarks are property of their respected owners.   

###