Under various code names (including “PineMango” and “Project Hydra”) Digium collected a wish list of features and functions for the next generation of distributed, fault-tolerant and “open” IP-based call processing features and functions and began generating and compiling code to provide the basis of those capabilities. The core technology is based on the Internet Communications Engine (ICE) from ZeroC.com. ICE is a freely distributed set of telephony middleware distributed according to the GNU General Public License (GPL). Therefore, it is ready-made for open source distribution and management.

For its part, Digium is stepping up to the tasks of managing a variety of resources for a developer community aimed at taking the “open source ACD” into new use cases that are global in nature and distributed, while at the same time highly reliable, secure and large-scale. Flexibility will be encouraged by the introduction of a low-level API that obviates the need for either the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) and the Asterisk Management Interface (AMI), each of which evolved “in front of” the original Asterisk code base to paper over some of the deficiencies of the original Asterisk code as it sought to support multiple application instances and handling real-time interactions and transactions.

Use of a low level API enables a broader set of developers, using the programming languages of their choice to build new applications and upload them to “the cloud” where they can be invoked and executed by others. It amounts to a much more capacious and feature-laden way to deploy new communications-enabled applications. At least that’s where things are heading. The evergreen issues, such as general security and the protection of data pumping through the signaling layer, are being sorted out. In the mean time, the system is architected to support “100% test coverage”, which is already an improvement over deployments of standard Asterisk implementations.

Here’s a link to the press release announcing the Asterisk SCF Project. In it Digium spokespeople note that this is definitely not a replacement for the existing Asterisk product (which is in release 1.8 at this time). But it encourages “early adopters” to visit the Asterisk SCF Project Web site to register, download the software and stay abreast of the latest developments.

I hope this isn’t getting too deep in the telephony weeds, but it strikes me as an under-reported development in the Recombinant Communications marketscape. Amazon, arguably the defining giant in Web-based retailing, has made impressive inroads into cloud-based e-commerce, where resources like “checkout”, “simple pay,” and “fulfillment” are extended to a broad spectrum of businesses through the cloud, where they reside with enhanced storage, security, database management and other Web services that can rival the likes of IBM, Microsoft, SalesForce.com and Oracle.

Optimization of EC2 to boost the performance of Asterisk seems to have begun in earnest roughly a year ago. Adding speech-enabled IVR using i6net’s beta program for testing VXI based VoiceXML scripts in EC2 began the following August. Apparently several applications have already moved into production. Thus we see RC on EC2 accelerating with the likes of i6net and Twilio leading the way.

By positioning the site as an effort to “beat Microsoft” the press and analysts cast the search giant Google in an underdog role. Google claims to have about two million businesses using either free or paid versions of Google Apps (I would be inthe “free” category). By comparison, the WSJ reporters observe that there are “around 500 million users of Microsoft Office”, according to the Microsoft spokespeople. That means there’s a long way to go to reach parity.

Yet, as Google adds more store-like qualities to the Solutions Marketplace, the site will take on the “recombinant qualities” of Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, which actively enlists third-party developers to build solutions that incorporate their software with resources in the SalesCloud or ServiceCloud. It is also expected to take on some of the qualities of the AppStore in Apple’s iTunes site, featuring product reviews, success stories and perhaps mechanisms to support user ratings.

Today, in classic Google style, the site features a lot of white space and blue links to landing pages which, in many cases, are blogs running on the original Blogger resource (Blogger’s parent, Pyra Labs, was acquired by Google in 2003). I’m not sure how the idea that Google is launching a “store” for business apps became “news”. Clearly it’s already up and running in the Solutions Marketplace. For instance, if you search the marketplace for “telephony” products you already find four products/services ranging from a unified directory utility to tools for building mashups based on the Android mobile operating system or Asterisk “open source” PBX.

Nonetheless, the news story was good stimulus to revisit the Google Web site to see how far The Sultan of Search has come in enlisting third-party software to augment its own cloud-based offering.