In 2004, Novacoast needed a new PBX! Having offices across the country, we sought a VOIP solution. The quotes we received from Cisco and Avaya seemed to be priced for a company much larger then us. We then discovered the Asterisk project, an open source VOIP PBX that had all the features we could possibly need.

In 2005, after running Asterisk for some time we realized a couple things. First, Asterisk was difficult to manage. It required setting up dialplan in a flat file which could only be completed by a linux engineer with a PBX background. Second, it didn't scale. To add an extension you had to edit a flat file and restart the entire phone system.

Enter VoiceRD. Novacoast started contributing the the Asterisk realtime project, a piece of code that allowed Asterisk to talk to an LDAP directory (highly scalable, optimized for reads, database designed for storing relatively static data like dialplan info)...