Digium Announces Keynote Speakers for AstriCon 2016, the Annual Asterisk User Conference

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Aug. 23, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today announced the keynote presenters for the AstriCon Open Source User Conference and Exhibition to be held September 27-29 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. Keynote speakers include industry leaders Bill Ledingham, CTO/EVP of Engineering at Black Duck Software, Chris Matthiue, Director of IoT Engineering at Citrix, and Matt Jordan, CTO at Digium.

Celebrating its 13th year, AstriCon remains the longest-running conference devoted to Asterisk, the most widely used open source communications platform in the world. AstriCon brings together the world's open source enthusiasts – from code developers and Asterisk integrators, to service providers and enterprise IT professionals – who all share an interest in Asterisk.

Ledingham's presentation will take place on Wednesday, September 28, at 9 a.m. MT and he will speak about "From Macro Trends to Micro Services: How Open Source Software is Reshaping the Development and Deployment of Applications and Services." In addition to his role at Black Duck Software, the industry leader in products and solutions that help companies secure and manage their use of open source software, he's also a partner at Converge Venture Partners, where he actively works with a number of early-stage companies. A veteran in the voice industry, he served as an executive and member of the founding team at SpeechWorks, a leader in speech-based solutions that IPO'd in 2000 and is now part of Nuance. He also has been on the founding team at other companies in the virtualization and information security spaces.

Matthiue will present "Asterisk of Things" on Thursday, September 29, at 9 a.m. MT. He will point to why Asterisk is in a key position to bridge machine-to-human-to-machine communications – both in technological terms, and as the IoT (a market expected to grow to nearly $20 trillion over the next five years) and Asterisk communities continue to align. He is the co-founder and CTO of Octoblu, a revolutionary real-time IoT platform recently acquired by Citrix. Octoblu connects things, systems, people and clouds to a global mesh network allowing users to automate and control design flows, processes and sensor data, and analyze/react to real-time events and messages as well as big data trends and anomalies. Prior to co-founding Octoblu, he was the founder of Nodester, an open-source Node.JS PaaS acquired by AppFog, and the founder of Teleku, a communications-as-a-service cloud platform acquired by Voxeo.

Jordan's wrap-up keynote session, "Asterisk: Past, Present, and Future," will close this year's event on Thursday, September 29, at 3:10 p.m. MT, bringing all the key messages around Asterisk together and looking into the medium-term future. As well as energizing the community with a glimpse into the future strategy for Asterisk, he will also preside over an update of the project delivered by some of the main members of the Asterisk development team.

The AstriCon conference contains multiple tracks with more than 50 sessions, offering attendees a variety of options during the three-day event. Topics include security, Asterisk-based distributions, Asterisk tutorials, Asterisk case studies, as well as sessions on WebRTC, speech technology, how to build scalable and resilient solutions, IoT and other related open source projects such as Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, Homer, CGRates and OpenSIPS. Returning for the second year is FreePBX World, a three-day event co-located at AstriCon where attendees will learn about open source business communications solutions, technology trends and FreePBX customer experiences.

"AstriCon this year is set to be a real treat for anyone in the Asterisk ecosystem," said David Duffett, Worldwide Community Director for the Asterisk project. "We are absolutely delighted to feature such relevant keynotes delivered by such suitable people, alongside the host of excellent conference sessions that are targeted at so many different disciplines – all with Asterisk as a key part of the picture. Whether you are a software engineer, solutions architect, system builder, part of the channel or an end user, there is something for you."

AstriCon 2016 is sponsored by Platinum Sponsors BICOM Systems, Vitelity and Teli; and by Gold Sponsors Grandstream, FreePBX by Sangoma, Call Cabinet, Flowroute and XORCOM. Additional sponsors include Loway, Tokgate, Teledynamics, Orecx, Sennheiser, Easy On Hold, Cepstral, NetXUSA, Jenne, Presence Technology, Algo Communications Solutions, OBIHAI, Lumenvox and Bandwidth.

About AstriCon
AstriCon is the longest-running event devoted to all things Asterisk, a free and open source framework for building communications applications that is downloaded nearly 2 million times per year. AstriCon's mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of Asterisk. Attendees will learn about trends in Asterisk use, the growing Asterisk ecosystem, the newest applications and a wide range of in-depth technical topics from Asterisk developers, users and entrepreneurs. AstriCon will be held September 27-29 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. Registration is open at www.astricon.net.

About Digium
Digium®, Inc. provides Asterisk® software, telephony hardware, and on-premises and hosted Switchvox business phone systems that deliver enterprise-class Unified Communications (UC) and UC as a Service (UCaaS) solutions at an affordable price. Digium is the creator, primary developer and sponsor of the Asterisk project; the world's most widely used open source communications software. Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a feature-rich communications server. A community of more than 80,000 developers and users worldwide uses Asterisk to create VoIP communication solutions in more than 170 countries. Since 1999, Digium has empowered developers to create innovative communications solutions based on open standards and open source software, providing an alternative to proprietary phone systems. Digium Switchvox Cloud and other cloud-based products and services are offered through Digium Cloud Services, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Digium, Inc. Digium's business communications products are sold through a worldwide network of reseller partners. More information is available at www.digium.com and www.asterisk.org.

The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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