One of our O’Reilly Network affilate sites, OSDir.com, has just posted an interview with Digium’s Mark Spencer. As you probably know, Mark is the man behind the wildly successful Asterisk open source PBX project.

OSDir.com: What are some trends in the PBX market that you’ve been noticing? What kind of technologies are in demand and expected?

Spencer: Most of our existing Asterisk base is fairly technically savvy people. Obviously,if you’re going to run Asterisk at the command line, and edit the config files, you need to know your way around Linux.

What we’re seeing now is what sort of happened in the router market as it went from being something very specialized to being something you just go buy at Best Buy. The idea that someone [who] didn’t really know a whole lot could buy a router and install it has changed the way people look at phone systems now. So we’re seeing companies building more targeted products, like a SoHo PBX or a Voice-over-IP gateway, and then building graphical interfaces and other components to make the whole thing a big seamless solution built around open-source software. Asterisk is the key telephony component and other components, like MySQL or Zimbra, [work] around it to provide other features.