[asterisk-biz] Altigen was : RE: PBX Functionality for Less than the Price of aKeySystem (3Com Asterisk IP Telephony Appliance)

[Gregory Boehnlein]

> I get a call from Altigen about once a week asking if we would like to
> be resellers of theirs.  Has anyone on this list had any dealings with
> Altigen, They say they are based on a Linux based widely used PBX
> platform, I don't want to fork over the money to find out it's a
> Trixbox with some dedicated Hardware IP phones.
>
> Any one out there know about these guys, Google just returns page after
> page of Press Releases, corporate filings, and Management
> announcements.

I am very familiar with Altigen. One of the businesses that I'm a Co-Owner
of a certified SIP Trunking providers for their dealer channel, so we do a
lot of work with them. We did a lot of Interop testing between Asterisk 1.2,
1.4 and their recently released SIP trunking products (Altigen MAX 1000. ACM
5.2 etc..)

Altigen is Windows based, not Linux based. They have been around for a long
time (10+ years). They trade on the NASDAQ as symbol ATGN. Stock has been
listed since late 1999. Current price is around $1.39 / share. It's always
been a Windows based platform, running w/ DSP based boards (ISA, PCI)
traditionally delivered on boxed solutions that they provide, although it
does run on a few off the shelf systems. I've had one system in production
that hasn't been rebooted in over 8 years. Very impressive for a windows
platform indeed! :)

They have recently brought in some new executive management (Jerry Flemming
formerly w/ Interactive Intelligence), and have been going through a serious
ramp up in marketing for their new SIP products, and changing their
direction. In the past, Altigen delivered a complete end to end proprietary
solution including phones, PBXs, and TDM interface cards. They used to do a
lot of H323, but have now moved on to SIP. They are working very hard to
open their architecture up so that any SIP standards device can be used w/
them. As an example, you can now use Aastra SIP phones instead of Altigen
phones and they are testing many others. Ultimately, they want to be a
software company, and not a hardware company.

Their software is pretty darn impressive and stable for a Windows based
offering, and is very competitively priced. We do side by side quotes w/
Altigen and Switchvox all the time, and there are certain features the
Altigen has that make it very attractive for small business deployments that
need solid integration w/ Windows applications (Outlook / Exchange etc..) We
have a few recruiters using the PC Recruiter software package, w/ the
Altigen soft-phone and we can't get them to even look at anything else.

Altigen customers are kind of like Asterisk users.. Very loyal.. you won't
get them to switch anytime soon..

Altigen is a good company. I'd keep an eye on their stock over the next few
quarters. They are spending a lot of cash getting their new models deployed,
and while they are declaring losses, their executive leadership really knows
how to think long term. I wouldn't be surprised to see Altigen's stock above
$3.00 a share in a couple of quarters.

Oh yeah.. like any product, Altigen has it's quirks/irks and issues, but for
the most part their stuff delivers a high level of value and stability for
the dollar figure.