Asterisk – a star of the future?
Larry Ellison has his super yacht, Bill Gates has his humanitarian fund. For Mark Spencer, the symbol of his success is a hot tub.
It may not be the most expensive trophy, but Spencer’s achievement may well prove to be just as revolutionary - turning the world of enterprise telephony on its head.
The tub, now installed at his Huntsville, Alabama home, was bought for him as a token of gratitude by 150 software developers who work on the platform he initiated - Asterisk, the Linux-based IP private branch exchange (PBX) software.
Spencer started work on Asterisk when he was running a Linux support company. “I was still a college student,” he says. “I wanted a phone system and I wasn’t going to buy one for several thousand dollars.”
In 2001, he decided that the open source PBX business would be a better bet than the support game, and decided to refocus the business around it.
His company is now called Digium. It provides Asterisk-based PBXes and telephone hardware, and sponsors the Asterisk open source project. He is competing in a world of office telephone hardware dominated by the big telephone equipment players, such as Nortel, Alcatel and Siemens.
