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Perhaps one of the biggest misperceptions among those who dabble in communications is that Asterisk (News - Alert) is only used in small business environments. The reality is that Asterisk is being used in service provider environments as well.

Of course this doesn't mean the product, designed to work well in small to medium-sized business (SMB) settings, is also able to instantly become the heart of a service provider install. Asterisk plus a variety of additions is what a service provider needs to use this popular open source product.

In an effort to simplify the process of adding Asterisk to the service provider environment, Digium (News - Alert) — the company behind the world's most popular open source communications software — has partnered with Integrics, the maker of Enswitch.

According to an article on the subject by TMCnet's Susan Campbell, Enswitch allows service providers to use Asterisk in order to provide full-featured telephone management and billing solutions, calling card integration, toll free and number translation services, voice mail, call queuing, ACD, fax to e-mail, and multi-level IVR.

The feature set of Enswitch is surprisingly robust. For example, it provides XML and PDF invoices for customers, wizard-based activation, simple sales tax management, Web-based administration, sophisticated authentication mechanisms, shared speed dials, .csv integration, dial by name, and unlimited classes of service. Carriers would be hard-pressed to find a feature that Integrics hasn't thought of.

So what does such an announcement mean to the market? For one thing, service providers are likely to feel more comfortable working with products from Integrics because they now have the Digium brand, muscle and market power behind them.

In addition, we can expect the service provider market to embrace open source at an even more rapid pace.

Rich Tehrani is President and Group Editor in Chief at TMC (News - Alert). In addition he is the Chairman of the world’s best attended IP Communications event, Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO. To read more of Rich’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He blogs for TMCnet here.