Asterisk Becomes An Appliance

Asterisk, is an Open Source IP PBX in software. It runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OSX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris.

While Asterisk has been available for several years, getting a working system configured was somewhat challenging for folks with limited technical abilities or those not comfortable in the Linux environment. While Asterisk seemed interesting, for many, the learning curve seemed too challenging. As a result, Asterisk has not had much of an impact on mainstream IP Telephony. AsteriskNOW may change that fact in a significant way.

As described on the AsteriskNOW website:

“AsteriskNOW™ is a Software Appliance; a customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk®, the Asterisk GUI, and all other software needed for an Asterisk® system. The most popular open source IP PBX software, Asterisk®, can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. AsteriskNOW™ includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk®, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.”

Yesterday, I downloaded the Beta 2 release from http://www.asterisknow.org/downloads and had a working configuration up and running in about 30 minutes. It was quite easy to setup and Linux knowledge was not required.

While it is apparent that many configuration parameters still require use of the command line interface, I’m convinced that the GUI combined with the “Appliance-like” model will cause many non-geeks to notice the functionality that Asterisk delivers and will lead to its accelerated deployment in mainstream IP Telephony.