Alec Saunders of iotum is making what I think will be an important announcement today at VON Canada, that they are releasing an Asterisk integration module and an API for iotum. This is great news for both the Asterisk community, who will get the chance to start using iotum and incorporating its relevance-based communication tools into new Asterisk applications, and for iotum which in one fell swoop has greatly increased it’s potential user and developer base. Ted Wallingford broke the story last night and provides some good background on what iotum is trying to achieve with its relevance engine as well as the text of today’s press release.

The iotum Asterisk integration kit includes the source code and API documentation for an Asterisk module to allow the PBX to communicate directly with the iotum server. The integration kit has been released as a free, non-commercial beta for now, but Alec says licensing and pricing info will be coming soon, as well as details of a revenue-sharing program for Asterisk resellers and application developers. My reccomendation to Alec and the good folks at iotum is to keep the non-commercial licenses free and easy — one thing we’ve seen over and over at O’Reilly is that the companies that put up the fewest hurdles for developers to experiment, explore, and work with their technology reap the greatest rewards, often in very unexpected ways.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this announcement is that Alec says they decided to build iotum integration into Asterisk only about 6 weeks ago! That’s a great example of what I think is one of the most important changes happening in the world of telecommunications today — that new applications and features can now be created and deployed in a matter of weeks or months, instead of the years we’ve been used to when the communications infrastructure was solely the domain of the big telcos. I think both Asterisk and VoIP are huge parts of this, and the pace of change in telecommunications is only going to get faster and faster.

I know that as I’ve seen iotum demo’d one of the main things I’ve come away with is a desire to have their technology available to me, now. I suspect that this announcement and the integration with Asterisk will make that a reality soon for me and I’m really eager to see what devlopers come up with using iotum. I’ll try and get some hands-on tutorials on working with the iotum API and Asterisk publsihed here on ETel soon, so if this news excites you as much as it does me, watch this space. Congratulations Alec and company on another great move for iotum!