Mark Evans pens a great piece in The National Post about how Asterisk and its developer Mark Spencer will up-end the $13 billion PBX business. At risk are big players like Nortel, Alcatel and other PBX developers. Devoid of geek speak, Mark outlines the story so far, and what is to come. Chris Umiastowski, an analyst with TD Newcrest, tells NP that the big players will eventually embrace Asterisk. Terry Rybczynski, director of strategic enterprise technologies with Nortel, thinks it is too so soon. “It’s not a slam dunk by any means. There could be a niche market for it.” he says. That’s what they said about Linux, and look what happened. However, I think if it does become popular, then the big players will eventually adopt it and try and innovate around it. One thing I would love to see is a “phone company in a box,” based around Asterisk. Voxilla people were talking about it when I saw them at VoN.