User:Darren Schreiber/2600hz (draft)

2600hz (named after the 2600 Hz tone, used by AT&T Corporation as a steady signal to mark currently unused long-distance telephone lines) is an organization that builds free and open-source software for communications configuration and management. Their technology powers projects that help small and large businesses manage Voice over IP (VoIP) systems. Its first project, named blue.box, included a fully functional GUI and framework for building web-based VoIP tools. Development of blue.box is now community-driven. It is released under the MPL free software license. Their second project, known simply as Kazoo, is a distributed, clustered API-based communications infrastructure.

2600hz consists of two entities - 2600hz.com which forms the corporate arm of the organization, and 2600hz.org which forms the open-source arm of the organization. The corporation operates a hosted environment for the products 2600hz builds, as an alternative for companies who do not wish to setup their own servers, and funnels all revenues toward the development of the core open-source software, which lives at 2600hz.org. The software is in it's sixth year of active development.

History
2600hz's first product, blue.box, started as the TCAPI project in 2007 and was later renamed to the blue.box project. blue.box was turned over to community-only development in 2014 while 2600hz focused its efforts toward the next-generation product, Kazoo.

In 2010, 2600hz released a business desktop "Ad-Supported Phone" in an attempt to innovate in the telecom industry.

In late 2010, it became evident that the world was moving to cloud based services. 2600hz began development on a new project known as "Whistle", later changed to "Kazoo". In 2011, the first version of Kazoo was launched. GigaOm described the product as "taking things up a notch", and TechCrunch described the product as a new approach to replacing antiquated telephone infrastructure.

Companies such as Ooma confirmed they were using 2600hz software as the base for their services and over the next 36 months, the company grew by ten fold. In 2013, 2600hz announced the the first ever platform for opening the mobile networks.

Kazoo
Kazoo (originally named "Whistle") is currently the main development project. It is an open-source, distributed, API-driven telephony platform that allows the user to build telephony applications. It relies on FOSS software like Linux, Erlang, FreeSWITCH, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ. It utilizes REST architecture and API modules.

Open Source Code
2600hz's code is Open Sourced on Github and is broken into various sub-projects. These include the core application libraries and various user interfaces that interface with the APIs. The project is ranked as "very active" by the Open-Source ranking site Open Hub and has had 20,543 commits made by 90 contributors representing 445,370 lines of code. The project is primarily written in Erlang. The project builds off other free, open-source code from the FreeSWITCH, RabbitMQ, Kamailio and HAProxy projects.

Annual Conference
2600hz hosts an annual conference for open-source telecom enthusiasts known as KazooCon. The conference attracts hundreds of network operators and telecom enthusiasts from around the globe, including Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Ukraine, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. The event is hosted in San Francisco, CA.

Awards

 * The Voxies: 2011 award for "Best in Class Business Cloud VoIP"
 * The Telecom Council's SPIFFYS 2013 award for "Core Award - Best Fixed Telecom Opportunity"