Alexis Argent, Sales manager at VoIPon Solutions speaks to David Hardy, Director of Business Development of Digium at CeBIT 2013. The pair discuss the benefits of the Digium IP Phones compared to rival IP Phone products, and how the Digium Phones can be connected with Asterisk Servers.

You can watch the Video and see the full transcript below:

VoIPon: Hello, My Names is Alexis Argent, Sales Manager of VoIPon Solutions, I’m Joined here by David Hardy, the Director of Business Development for Digium out of Huntsville USA, we are both here at CeBIT 2013 finding it to be a pretty good show so far, how are you finding it David?

David Hardy, Digium: We are finding it very good, we are finding a lot of excitement for Asterisk and Digium products, we have been welcomed by the people here at CeBIT 2013 and its been overwhelming how good the response has been.

Alexis: That’s great to hear. We understand that Digium released a portfolio of IP Phones not so long ago, there is plenty of competition in the market so why should people buy Digium Phones over some of its competition?

David Hardy, Digium: That’s a really good question, you know we should probably give you some background. Right now with Asterisk there is 2 million downloads per year and around 86 thousand people within the community. We calculated around 1.3 million endpoints per year being attached to Asterisk servers. As a result of this we are finding people are putting in all these different VoIP Phones and sometimes the buttons work but it doesn’t have all the integration that they desire. To put it in there, it can be done but it becomes challenging.

What we saw was an opportunity to have a very tight integration with Asterisk and so that plus all the endpoints was the opportunity that we chased. As a result with a download from Digium which is free is an add on called “DPMA” which stands for Digium Phone Module for Asterisk , you put that with asterisk and from within Asterisk itself you can configure the Digium IP Phones and then through the DPMA the phones can self provision, with almost zero touch and have applications that are on the phones such as presence, call logs, visual, voicemail, the list goes on and on. This makes it very very easy for the Asterisk integrators to use the Digium Phones and deploy them.

Alexis: That’s great, I also hear that there has been some other software developments regards the Digium Phones, perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about that?

David Hardy, Digium: Yes, so right now we are in Beta for the API’s for the Digium Phones, the Digium D40 IP Phone, Digium D50 IP Phone and Digium D70 IP Phone.  What API does is allow the applications to be put on the phones and from third parties, so as a result different applications can be put on that are different from other phones where you get an asynchronous one way communication from the server down to the phones. What we do is use JavaScript, so you can have a synchronous communications and so applications on the phones can actually affect the call rules within the Asterisk server. That’s important because this way you can open up ideas for communication between the phone and the server itself or even to the back office with business applications that are running on the phone.

Alexis: Thats really good to hear, I’m very happy the Digium have taken this interview and we wish them the best of luck and there partners and customers.

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