About the Authors

Anthony Minessale has been involved in telephony since 2003. Prior to that, he had spent over ten years as a CTO and platform designer for various companies during the height of the Internet revolution. He has spent over half a decade working as the creator and lead developer of the FreeSWITCH open source project and several years before that as a volunteer developer for the Asterisk open source PBX, and is a noted contributor of several features on that project as well.

Anthony is the creator and owner of FreeSWITCH Solutions LLC, responsible for the popular annual VoIP conference, ClueCon, held every summer in Chicago. Anthony also works for Barracuda Networks as the director of Engineering for the CudaTEL PBX appliance, a product he and his team handcrafted to work with FreeSWITCH as the telephony engine.

I would like to thank the awesome FreeSWITCH community for their dedication to our project and the invaluable feedback they provide on a daily basis. A really big thank you to Michael Collins and Darren Schreiber for helping to put this book together. I would also like to thank Brian West and Michael Jerris for helping make FreeSWITCH even possible with all the time they devote to making it work. Finally I would like to thank the original Asterisk community who inspired us all to relentlessly push forward in open source telephony.

Michael S. Collins is a telephony and open source software enthusiast. He is a PBX veteran, having worked as a PBX technician for five years and as the head of IT for a call center for more than nine years. Michael is an active member of the FreeSWITCH community. He currently works for Barracuda Networks, Inc.

I would like to thank, first and foremost, my wife, Lisa, my daughter, Katherine, and my son, Sean, who keep me going each day. I would also like to thank the many FreeSWITCH experts around the world who are so willing to answer technical questions: Michael Jerris, Moises Silva, Raymond Chandler, Mathieu Réné and more. I would especially like to thank Brian K. West for taking me under his wing and educating me in the ways of VoIP. Finally, I would like to say thank you to Anthony Minessale for authoring an amazing piece of software and inviting me to work with the core FreeSWITCH development team.

Darren A. Schreiber is helping pioneer the way to distributed cloud telephony solutions. He is the founder of the 2600hz Project, the TCAI project, and is the author of the latest version of FreePBX, a popular open source telephony management system. He has worked in Enterprise IT for over 15 years and has lead teams in successful projects in telecom, marketing, and web-based SaaS spaces. He has been a serious telephony enthusiast from a young age and has been working extensively with VoIP technologies for the past seven years. Darren graduated from Rensselaer with a degree in Computer Science and Business Entrepreneurship.