Venture capital firm Matrix Partners has just pumped $13.8 million into Digium, the creators of the popular open source PBX (private branch exchange) software Asterisk. The investment is another example of how VoIP-enabled products are entering the mainstream. While already leading to lower prices for some consumers, VoIP has increasingly made its way into the office, especially for businesses that do substantial international calling. The marriage of low-cost VoIP calls and open source PBX routing equipment would seem to be a marriage that both geeks and bean counters could love, and Matrix wants in on the action.
The move is a big vote of confidence in the PBX technology, which pits Digium against far larger players in the battle to privide PBX systems to businesses. But the high cost of traditional, closed-source systems has made inexpensive Asterisk systems attractive to a wide range of businesses, and Matrix general partner David Skok sees an opportunity for Digium to post some big gains. "As companies continue to be attracted to the cost savings and powerful new capabilities of Voice over IP, the opportunity for Digium becomes massive," he said. "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."