Asterisk is the new LAMP

I met with a startup today that does some interesting work bridging web services APIs with telephony, and I stopped them early in their presentation to ask what their voice platform was. The discussion was purely about their service, not the backend nuts-and-bolts, but I just had to ask: “Are you using Asterisk?” They were, of course. (I became interested in Asterisk and wrote about it just over a year ago in one of my last InfoWorld columns. There’s also an O’Reilly book on Asterisk that was published last fall).

I suspect that the “yeah, we’re using Asterisk” answer will become as commonplace and unremarkable as the “yeah, we’re using the LAMP stack.” Very cool. Expect some amazing things in this space as developers dreaming of new voice applications start playing with Asterisk more broadly.