Mark Spence
Digium
www.digium.com
The year was 1999 and like many soon-to-be college grads, Mark Spencer had entrepreneurial fever. The computing engineering major at Auburn University decided to set up a business in his parents' house doing Linux tech support. The only problem? He needed a phone system and as a tiny startup with no funding, he couldn't afford one. So he built his own.
Six years later, more than 250,000 companies have downloaded his free PBX system, called Asterisk. Spencer may jokingly refer to Digium as the "smallest telecom company in the world that matters," but big players are starting to agree.
On Sept. 20, the company announced a joint development agreement with Intel to run Asterisk's system on the chip giant's hardware. So far, Asterisk is favored by small and midsize businesses, but the Intel deal is a bid to build a more robust, high-end product that big companies can buy. Spencer also has had talks with IBM and AT&T, and British Telecom even runs Asterisk in some parts of its operation. "I was very surprised at the companies expressing interest in Asterisk," he says. "We're not that big."
Spencer has no delusions of becoming the next overnight sensation. He is slowly building a business. Phone systems with full features like call routing, voicemail, and directories are expensive, and there's a huge market among small and midsize businesses that need those features but balk at the price tag. "To say telecom is ripe for open source is an understatement," says the 28-year-old entrepreneur. "The cost difference is very extreme -- and smaller companies still want strong phone systems."