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At my company we use open source projects such as BIND (for an ENUM / DNS based call routing directory) around the edges of our VoiceXML / VOIP IVR hosting service, but not in our core platform.

Originally we did use early open source VOIP projects such as OpenH323. OpenH323 was great, but it needed to be replaced as we moved to SIP and required reliability beyond what OpenH323 offered.

Asterisk is in a similar place - it is a great project that has seen some great early success in voip. I have heard that Vonage, for example, uses it in their voicemail system. I also use it at home and we have several projects at work in the research phase that incorporate it.

Asterisk is not reliable enough for our production environment today - reboots every few weeks to few months are common. As a project it is similar to where Linux was 5+ years ago - plenty of momentum but not quite ready for mission critical use. I have no doubt Asterisk will become as pervasive and reliable as Linux and other leading open source projects have though. Asterisk is an extremely flexible, easy to work with project; and the people involved are also easy to work with and know telephony very well.

I've started to use Asterisk for various applications, including as a

- PSTN to VOIP gateway: combine a cheap server, asterisk, and a few $50 voicemodem cards and you've got a VOIP gateway that can connect your outside phone lines to any VOIP phone.

- VOIP to PSTN gateway: cheap server, asterisk, open VOIP provider like VoicePulse Connect, and some Digium FXS cards and you can connect every phone in your house to a VOIP network.

- PSTN/VOIP front-end to IVR gateway: cheap server, Asterisk, IVR provider like Voxeo and you can connect all of the above to custom voice recognition applications. (Asterisk has some built in IVR but its limited today.)

Several companies are starting to offer commercial PBX products based on Asterisk, including http://www.signate.com/ and http://www.fonality.com/.

In summary, Asterisk is becoming an amazing "telephony widget" - it can address a variety of telephony solution requirements, depending on how you configure it.

His employer appears to have been Voxeo

link: http://www.voxeo.com/

source: http://www.mail-archive.com/cf-jobs@houseoffusion. com/msg01747.html

This is not quite the angle you were looking for, but you might find it interesting or useful. Their service would let you do this and much more. However, not using your phone number... They give you a number, calls to it generate an http query, you implement the XML to drive their telephony server. See http://www.voxeo.com . I am not connected with voxeo in anyway.

If you want to take your app commercial, you can purchase time on an 800 number. Number are available in the Bay Area, New Jersey and Chicago. These are cool guys -- I met them when they "left stealth mode" at the Pulver Voice Over Network developers conference in January.

With the help of a new company called Voxeo and an X10 firecracker, I created something that allows me to control my own house lights and appliances for free with my cell phone or a web browser.