Freeside Billing

Freeside's open-source billing, CRM, trouble-ticketing and automation software copped a Best of Show award at this month's Digium Asterisk World / IT Expo in Miami -- the second year in a row it's collected the honor. It's as described: open-source software for ISPs, VoIP, hosted solutions, service providers and other customers, including Web-based businesses, that don't want to pay through the nose for comparable proprietary systems. Freeside itself began as an internal application developed by a regional ISP in the mid-90s, from which its founders released the first open-source version of its code and turned the application into a consultancy and provider of pre-configured hardware.