Owen Linderholm The latest version of Asterisk is a refresh of the flagship business product, Asterisk Business Edition. Digium, the company that supported the open source development of Asterisk and that supervises the ongoing efforts to improve Asterisk, announced the new edition, called the B.1 edition, at the Globalcomm conference in Chicago. The new version of the Asterisk Business Edition includes enhanced security and scalability features from Ranch Networks. The Ranch Networks features provide MIDCOM integration for dynamic per-call firewall control, bandwidth management, NAT traversal, and RTP traffic bridging – all supporting encrypted signaling streams. In addition, other technologies from Ranch Networks separate voice, video, and data traffic into multiple, secure zones without having to reconfigure IP addresses. Other features in the new release include speech conversion technologies. Speech recognition capabilities have been improved using the LumenVox Speech Engine and text-to-speech applications are now supported by the Cepstral Text-to-Speech System. "LumenVox`s goal was to reach the innovative community of Asterisk users," said Gerd Graumann, director of business development at LumenVox. "Now, with the integration of our speech recognition technology, Business Edition customers can easily speech-enable their applications."The final, and perhaps most important, improvement is that the new B.1 Business Edition comes as a customized Linux install to make installation easier - a common criticism of Asterisk. "Asterisk Business Edition has given the enterprise user a cost effective and reliable way to incorporate open source technology," said Jim Webster, director of software technologies for Digium. "This upgraded version, with enhanced security and advanced features provided by our partners, will make it even easier for businesses to opt for a telephony platform based on open source development and open standards over proprietary systems, especially in the migration to VoIP."