Bridging the Islands - Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Google Talk; VON Fall 2005

There was an interesting and provocative panel session at VON. Representatives from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Nortel and Radvision talked about the value of open standards and interoperability. Each one of them acknoledged the importance and value of communications standards such as SIP and IMS.

I took away two important comments from the discussion:

1) Standards are just the tip of the iceberg. Implementing the specifications and ensuring interoperability between implementations is far more involving and typically takes 3-4 years after the standards are published. This poses a big challange to next generation telcos. In a fast paced world, 3-4 years is an enormous amount of time. There is a chance that more agile alternatives will emerge and gain market share. Asterisk and Skype are already making this point.

The morale of the story for me is that Open Standards supporters should share resources and extend their collaboration beyond specifications into implementation. Open Standards + Open Source implementations seems to make a lot of sense. It ensures low cost, fast paced creation of a unified platforms that a large network of providers can benefit from. It cuts the costs of duplicated development and interoperability testing.

2) While Yahoo, Google and MS talked about the value of interconnected networks, they did not answer very well my SIMPLE question, which was: "When are we going to be able to send a SIMPLE message from MSN Messenger to Yahoo Messenger to Google Talk?".

Russell Bennett at Microsoft said that they supported SIP and SIMPLE since 2001 and are ready to interop with Google as soon as Google is ready. Mike Jazayeri at Google said that they are ready to interop with Microsoft as soon as Microsoft invites them. Madhu Yarlagadda said that Yahoo Messenger 7 supports SIP and they are currently piloting a bridge with MSN. Fingers crossed for the pilot to come through.

I talked to Madhu after the session and he told me that they are working on a program to allow service providers to test connectivity with Yahoo Messenger servers. Mike told me the same about Google Talk. Hopefully the Mobicents community will soon obtain access to try out SLEE services for the two major communications networks.

Here are some pictures from the session:

VON was a blast

We had exceptionally exciting days at VON. Ranga and I were approached by a number of industry players who expressed their support of the Mobicents project. This is the kind of recognition that keeps us going.

Our presentation went great. We had a small audience of experts who knew what Mobicents was and had specific technical questions. What really impressed me was that all 3 demos showed on 3 different laptops worked smoothly. The High Availability demo for SIP mid-call and registrar failover, the EclipSLEE built Wake Up service and the WiFi SIP hand held phone from ZyXel all clicked nicely. That was a surprise to me, because I usually get caught by the demo syndrom and nothing works in front of an audience :).

While we were having fun at VON, the folks at Lucent did amazing work tuning the SIP RA and the SLEE engine. Leondo reported new performance peak of sustained 50cps!!! This puts us only half way from the "unreacheable" carrier grade 100cps! The folks that are tracking the project are probably as shocked as I am that we managed to get from 1 to 50cps in 2 months. Not bad.

I am done packaging the new beta release and will make the announcement later today.

Microsoft Responds to Google Talk?

I don't think so. There is no mention of open standards support in the new MSN Messenger 7.5. Windows Messenger 5.1 is still the latest known MS client that openly supports SIP. I am sticking to it for the time being.

eBay acquires Skype

This is all over the technology and business news. It's been a while since tech companies were valued at 70 times their revenue. VoIP is not all talk any more.

Microsoft Acquires VoIP Startup Teleo

Microsoft won't let Yahoo and Google ride the VoIP PR buzz by themselves. Teleo isn't nearly as popular as DialPad, and they haven't even released a product. Plus Windows Messenger was already a decent SIP client with a good IM user base. But hey, you've got to trust this is money well spent.

Google and Skype opening up a can of goodness

A few weeks after Yahoo! acquired DialPad, Google launched Google Talk and Skype followed immediately by opening up its API. Microsoft is not playing possum either.

With a large desktop install base of interoperable clients using open protocols, VoIP is explosively becoming as pervasive as the Web.

It doesn't take a genius to figure that what follows is a mushroom effect of VoIP service providers. The first big wave is coming from pure play providers like Vonage, traditional ISPs (EarthLink), incumbent telcos (SBC, AT&T) and mobile carriers (Verizon, Vodafone).

Household names like Amazon and eBay will follow next and pave the road to thousands of other web sites. After all it is more natural to ask "can I see the latest MP3 players?" than it is to write it down.

An important question is - what platform will be used to build all these new services on? There are several proprietary ones available on the market, which will flourish in the short term because of the huge demand. As history shows though, before long, Open Standards, Open Source platforms will mature and will take over the lion share. Keep an eye on the Mobicents project as it continues to grow at an accelerated rate community of industry contributors, academia and freelancers.

Ivelin

Open Cloud contributes IDE to Mobicents

Open Cloud generously contributed a fully functional SLEE development tool to the Mobicents project. The tool is an Eclipse plugin, which simplifies the process of creating and deploying VoIP services. Result of several years of research and development, this contribution represents a significant investment by the leading SLEE vendor to the Open Source community.
https://eclipslee.dev.java.net/

The Mobicents team greatly appreciates the contribution and is looking forward to continue the productive relationship with Open Cloud.

Both teams are also starting collaborative work on standardizing the SIP Resource Adaptor Type and Service Building Blocks so that SIP applications are interoperable between the two popular SLEE platforms - Mobicents and Rhino.
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=1155&tstart=0
http://www.mobicents.org
http://www.opencloud.com/slee/intro.html

Ivelin