Those of us head-down in this business of open source and emerging telecom will sometimes lose sight of the big picture. So busy with the day-to-day routine of running our respective businesses, we need to raise our eyes from the grindstone every now and then and have a look at the landscape.

A study recently done by the Eastern Management Group looked to quantify open source PBX adoption. The results show that open source telecom has been wildly successful.

This is personally satisfying, because I predicted in the first edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony that open source PBXs were going to change the telecom industry. I was not alone in this belief; it was something that was very obvious to those of us immersed in this space. Telecom had lost it’s soul, and we had found it back.

Two weeks ago I was at the Amoocon conference in Rostock, Germany. Conferences are important to someone like me. Our industry is still very grass-roots, and if we don’t hang out with our peers every now and then, we run the risk of losing sight of the big picture.

Open source telecom is alive and well, and still taking over the world.