I’ve been asked two main questions since it was announced that Sangoma was buying Digium. First is “What’s the real story?” As if what we’ve said in the press release and to investors and to customers isn’t the real story. Well, the real story is what we said there. But I think the real unasked question, which is why this is coming up, is that the people who ask these questions are confused about Asterisk and FreePBX. They are both open source, yes, but they do not really compete.

See, Asterisk is really a communications development platform. A toolkit is another word for that for the old people out there. It is best known as a platform that can be a PBX, but the Asterisk platform can be utilized and molded into much more. FreePBX is built on Asterisk and indeed is an open-source PBX. So, they complement each other, and merging the two largest open source communications suppliers into one has benefits. The merged company is committed to both projects, and we will continue to invest in R&D to further enhance those products. Having the two projects under the same roof should improve the level of cooperation between the two development teams, and allow us to better position each project to meet the needs of our users. And we will be able to better coordinate interaction with both communities now that they can be managed from one organization.

The second question is more about business. Yes, both companies do have a PBX/UC product that is sold as either CPE or via a cloud. And we continue to sell and support them. They are fully supported PBX/UC products just like a CIO would be used to. And put together, we have enough business and scale to create a true industry leader in enterprise, value-based business communications, enabling us to better meet all the needs of our customers.

The other question I get is “What kind of leader?” We feel like we are the leader in the enterprise, value-based communications segment. This is a segment in which customers look for all the advantages of Unified Communications at a fair price. One that we can sell and support globally. This segment spans small businesses to large enterprises and is one that we offer either in the cloud or on-premise, so we can give customers pretty much everything they need. This is true value.

So, that’s what the deal was about and why we did it. We are looking forward to the future.