Critical Links Becomes a Member of Digium’s Partner Program

London, UK and Huntsville, AL — 3 October 2006 — Digium® Inc., the Asterisk® company, and Critical Links, an international networking technology company, today announced that Critical Links has become a Product and Solution Partner of Digium. As a result of this agreement, Digium and Critical Links will participate in co-marketing activities.

edgeBOX provides an affordable, secure and QoS assured platform for VoIP deployment in small and medium sized businesses. It includes a feature rich IP-PBX based on Asterisk and a VoIP gateway using Digium's analogue and digital interface cards, also supporting Digium's latest echo cancellation cards (the TE411P).

“By partnering with innovative companies like Critical Links we can offer the business community more options and features when building high-end telephony systems based on Asterisk,” said Jim Webster, director of software technologies at Digium. “We look forward to working together with Critical Links to expand the VoIP market and at the same time, communicate the important role open source will play in furthering the telecom market.”

“We are pleased to be partnering with Digium, the recognized world leader in developing Linux based VoIP technologies," said Joao Carreira, Critical Links CEO. "We have been incorporating their technology in our products since the start of 2005 and, as a result, the interest in edgeBOX has grown tremendously. We can now provide a complete voice and data networking solution in a single box which greatly simplifies VoIP deployment, is cost effective, and addresses the concerns that users have over security and call quality," he added.

About Digium
Digium, the Asterisk company, is the original creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the industry's first open source telephony platform. Digium provides hardware and software products, including the Asterisk Business Edition™, its professional grade version of Asterisk, to enterprises and telecommunications providers worldwide. Digium also offers a full range of professional services including consulting, technical support and custom software development services.

Used in combination with Digium's PCI telephony interface cards, Asterisk offers a strategic, highly cost-effective approach to voice and data transport over IP, TDM, switched and Ethernet architectures. Digium’s offerings include legacy PBX, IVR, auto attendant, next generation gateways, media servers and application servers. Additional information can be found at www.digium.com.

About Asterisk
Code for Asterisk, originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium Inc., has been contributed to from open source software engineers around the world. Currently boasting over 1 million users, Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces, and VoIP packet protocols such as IAX, SIP and H.323. It supports U.S. and European standard signaling types used in business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next-generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastructure.

The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respected owners.

About Critical Links
Critical Links (www.critical-links.com) is an international networking technology company, with its edgeBOX solution, a new business gateway concept, having the best feature to price ratio of any multi-function converged network device on the market. It has the added flexibility of being available in a range of customisable and scalable hardware platforms such as branded servers.
edgeBOX is primarily targeted at SMEs and Enterprise Branch Offices, placing it between low-end networking appliances and high-end data centre installations. The edgeBOX is currently commercialised by an extensive partner network in the UK, Brazil, China, Chile, Germany, Spain, South Africa and Portugal. Critical Links provides support and update services that keep edgeBOX secure and reliable.
Critical Links is a wholly owned subsidiary of Critical Software SA, established in 1998, with over 100 employees, headquarters in Portugal and subsidiary offices in the UK and USA. The company is CMMI Level 3 compliant and has a reputation for producing mission and business critical networking and telecoms solutions for the telecoms, public sector, industry, aerospace and defence markets, with customers such as Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Infineon Technologies, NASA, EADS and ESA.

Media Contacts:
Janine Savarese - jsavarese@mrb-pr.com
Carlos Taveira - carlos-taveira@criticalsoftware.com