While Digium plays in both open and closed source, the company's enhancements to Asterix and Switchvox share a common purpose: more closely tying in other services and software commonly in use in the enterprise.

The new platforms come as the latest effort by Digium to capitalize on enterprises' increasing interest in unified communications (UC), which offers to move features like voice telephony, video, messaging and collaboration services onto a single IP-based platform -- which ostensibly helps companies cut costs in the process. A recent studysponsored by Siemens, a UC vendor, reported that 53 percent of large U.S. companies are discussing, pursuing or implementing such installations.

UC has attracted all of the major players in enterprise messaging and VoIP. As for Digium, UC and integration with other enterprise software is becoming a key feature of both Switchvox and Asterisk, for which the company serves as lead commercial sponsor.

Asterisk, an open source VoIP PBX, has been making waves in the market since its 1.0 release in 2004. While the coming weeks are expected to see some incremental new features and bug fixes with the launch of its 1.6.1 version, it's the upcoming 1.8 version that will deliver several really slick features, Asterisk community manager John Todd told InternetNews.com.