Company behind FreePBX acquires developer of Asterisk

The Canadian company Sangoma Technologies, owner of FreePBX, has announced that it is buying all shares of the American Digium. That company is known for its open source PBX software Asterisk.

In the announcement of the acquisition, Sangoma writes that it expects to pay an amount of $ 28 million for the shares, which is just over 24 million euros. The company’s CEO Bill Wignall said: “Sangoma and Digium have a long history of working together, while also competing in the marketplace, and have come to know each other well over the years.” He adds that he expects to become the market leader through the merger. The Asterisk software will remain open source, he promises.

According to Mark Spencer, who founded Digium in 1999, Sangoma is “the natural home” for Asterisk, as both companies contributed to its development. Asterisk is open source software for pbx telephone exchanges and makes it possible to use functions such as voicemail and group calls, among other things. Digium claims that Asterisk now runs on millions of telephone systems. FreePBX, in turn, is an open source gui for Asterisk.

The companies should have a total number of more than 300 employees after the merger, Sangoma said.