Asterisk, open source telephony software, will benefit from $13.8 million in venture capital funding for Digium, the company behind Asterisk. According to Om Malik, “the company will use these funds to expand its operations by selling a variety of Asterisk-based IP-PBX systems to small business and large corporations.” Asterisk has been growing in popularity recently as companies make the move away from older, expensive PBX systems to VoIP. I know of several companies who have already moved to Asterisk, and people seem to be happy with the Asterisk solution.

From the official press release:

“We believe Digium has the potential to become one of our most successful open source companies, as every company in the world relies on telephony and the use of PBXs in order to run their businesses,” said David Skok, a general partner at Matrix Partners and JBoss board member. “As companies continue to be attracted to the cost savings and powerful new capabilities of Voice over IP, the opportunity for Digium becomes massive. Digium is definitely in a position to become the next big open source company, behind Red Hat, JBoss and MySQL. Their current revenues, profitability, and growth rates are extraordinary.”
With the anticipated growth of IP-based communications and the continued acceptance of open source, Digium has a unique opportunity to become a dominant player in the telecommunications market. Additionally, because of the built-in flexibility of Asterisk, companies are able to build hybrid PBX solutions (a combination of legacy and VoIP equipment) in migrating to a VoIP system. (Digium)

I always like seeing venture capital money go to strong open source products, like Asterisk.