Open Source gaining ground in Egypt & worldwide

Founder and President of the American company Digium, Mr Spencer has recently been deemed the most influential executive worldwide in the field of web-enabled voice transmissions, formally termed Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP.

This cutting-edge lecture, presented in conjunction with the Egyptian GNU/Linux Users Group (EGLUG), is part of a technical seminar series led by Egyptian open source company OpenCraft. A provider of open source business applications and technical consulting to leading organizations like Al Futtaim, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and Reuters, OpenCraft also has a community-minded aim to share knowledge and foster new ideas, hence this popular series. OpenCraft's seminars regularly draw some of Egypt's keenest IT professionals, attracted by the challenging topics and high caliber of speakers.

Mr Spencer, an Egyptian-American, has contributed most prominently to the global VoIP movement with his product Asterisk. It's a free software application that enables basic phone calls on analog or VoIP systems, plus a full suite of additional business-ready functionality such as voicemail, caller ID, and teleconferencing. In telecom jargon, it's a private branch exchange, or PBX, since it facilitates internal or private calling within an organization as well as external calls. According to Forbes magazine, Asterisk can help businesses cut their phone costs by as much as 80%.

Mr Spencer is accomplishing his VoIP revolution by means of that other hot topic: open source development. Open source refers to software that is freely available and for which the code can be readily modified by volunteer developers, with Linux operating systems as perhaps the best-known example. It's an alternative to commercial software for which the code is often a closely guarded corporate secret. The collaborative model is key to Asterisk's success, since tens of thousands of volunteer developers worldwide have added to Spencer's original code to create so much powerful functionality.

Mr Spencer firmly believes that open source is a means to stronger, more innovative technology solutions. "It frees customers from being locked in to a specific vendor, architecture, protocol, or even upgrade path, so the real winner is the customer. This is perhaps even more important in Egypt, where getting locked in to a proprietary system can mean having to stick with that supplier even if costs skyrocket or service starts to slump. Open source gives you a survivability that is really unmatched."

Open source is steadily making inroads into Egypt, with firms such as OpenCraft handling multiple projects here.

"Open source has definitely achieved credibility in large-scale organizations, both corporate and government, in recent years," stated OpenCraft Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Rady Fahmy. "It is a clear, viable, and often cost-saving alternative for leaders that are looking to hold better control of the technology that is so critical for their business's survival and growth."

"From NGOs to multi-national corporations, leading organizations are trusting open source solutions to be the strong, sustainable backbone of their infrastructure," Mr Fahmy continued.

"This has been true for years now in areas such as enterprise infrastructure and web-based business applications, and now, thanks to people like Mark Spencer, we're seeing it take hold in telephony as well. Businesses right here in Egypt can definitely benefit now from the innovation and stability of open source, and the possibilities will only increase in the future."