Digium Adds Clarus Communications to Cloud Agent Program

Digium, the company behind the popular open source VoIP PBX software Asterisk, has announced that Clarus Communications has joined its Digium Cloud Agent Program.

"We are excited to bring on Clarus Communications as a Digium Master Agent," said Jim Butler, Digium's director of global channel sales. "Clarus brings a unique set of resources and tools to their clients. With the help of Clarus Communications, and their network of subagents, we believe that we can quickly expand the reach of Digium's Switchvox Cloud service."

Clarus will offer Digium’s Switchvox Cloud, a unified communications solution.

"We are pleased to add Digium's Switchvox Cloud service to our portfolio of carriers and vendors," said Chris Torbit, a principal at Clarus Communications. "The demand for cloud phone systems is growing rapidly and Digium's Switchvox Cloud service gives us a way to uniquely address this opportunity with an all-inclusive feature set and simplified pricing model."

Asterisk, on which Switchvox Cloud is based, has been one of the open source movement’s major enterprise technology success stories, along with Linux, the Apache Web server and the Samba file server.

Digium established itself by democratizing a previously complicated technology, the PBX, as well as popularizing VoIP. Asterisk’s popularity with everyone from large enterprise businesses to hobbyists is a testament to its flexibility.

Digium has also shown how business can coexist with the ideals of the free software and open source movements. While the stock Asterisk software can be downloaded for free, it requires hardware manufactured by Digium to run.

For businesses who want a ready-to-run solution, they can turn to Switchvox. Using the Linux analogy again, Switchvox is the equivalent of the Red Hat or Ubuntu distributions which are preconfigured, while Asterisk is more like the Gentoo or Arch distributions and require some more tinkering even as it offers an amazing amount of flexibility.