Digium Announces Keynote Speakers for AstriCon 2014, the Annual Asterisk Users Conference

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Sep 23, 2014, 09:00 ET

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., Sept. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, announced today the keynote presenters for the AstriCon Open Source User Conference and Exhibition to be held October 22-24, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nev. Keynote speakers include Craig Walker, CEO and founder of UberConference, and Russell Bryant, principal software engineer, Red Hat.

Celebrating its 11th 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.

Walker is the CEO and co-founder of UberConference. He brings a broad background as an experienced entrepreneur, venture capitalist, executive, and corporate attorney to the company. Launched in 2012, UberConference is funded by Google Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The idea for UberConference was conceived during the time Walker was entrepreneur-in-residence at Google Ventures.

Prior to UberConference, Walker was CEO and co-founder of GrandCentral Communications. Google acquired the company in July 2007, and GrandCentral became Google Voice. While there, he ran Google's Real Time Communications Group.

Walker's career in telecommunications began in 2001 when he ran Dialpad Communications, which he sold to Yahoo! in 2005. Previously, he was a technology venture investor at Sterling Payot Capital and TeleSoft Partners and a corporate attorney at top-tier law firms in Silicon Valley, where he represented companies ranging from early stage startups to Cisco Systems.

Walker's AstriCon presentation on October 23 at 9 a.m. will focus on his involvement in communications' journey towards the web, and his observations on where this technology is heading.

Bryant is a principal software engineer at Red Hat where he works on the OpenStack project. He is an elected member of the OpenStack Technical Committee which provides overall technical oversight and governance for the OpenStack project. He served as the OpenStack Compute (Nova) Project Technical Lead for two releases (Havana and Icehouse) and is still a member of the Nova Core team.

He also has a long history within the Asterisk community. Bryant has been contributing to Asterisk development since 2004, including leading the project for some time. He co-authored "Asterisk: The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly Media. He also contributed a chapter on Asterisk to the book "Architecture of Open Source Applications." In 2013, Business Insider recognized Bryant as one of the 50 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech.

Bryant will present on October 24 at 9 a.m. and will speak about open cloud and other technological advances that have facilitated the move of communications to the web and elastic cloud infrastructure.

The AstriCon conference contains four tracks with more than 45 sessions, offering attendees a variety of options during the three-day event. Topics include, security and Asterisk-based distributions, Asterisk tutorials, Asterisk case studies, as well as service provider, WebRTC and cloud sessions.

"We are ecstatic this year to have two great keynotes that truly represent the future of communications, which is demonstrated by the speakers' intimate involvement in the recent evolution of voice and video collaboration solutions. The Asterisk community has surpassed itself this year, with a very rich and varied collection of conference sessions, all delivered by those with front-line experience in the specific area of expertise," said David Duffett, worldwide community director for the Asterisk project. "The sessions reveal a closer look at fascinating Asterisk implementations and those projects that work with Asterisk to deliver all sorts of scalable and resilient solutions, and include a glimpse into some of the more unusual uses of Asterisk."

About AstriCon
AstriCon is the pioneer and longest running event devoted to all things Asterisk, one of the most influential open source projects today. Attendees will learn about trends in Asterisk use, the growing Asterisk ecosystem, the newest applications and a wide range of technical topics from Asterisk developers, users and entrepreneurs. AstriCon will be held from October 22-24 at the Red Rock Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nev. Registration is open at www.astricon.net.

About Digium
Digium®, Inc. provides Asterisk® software, telephony hardware, and hosted and on-premises 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 http://www.digium.com and http://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.