VON Magazine on The Open Source Craze

The October issues of VON Magazine (vol 3, No 10) features on its front page The Open Source Craze (p58).

Doug Mohney reviews the state of Open Source in IP Communications today. He cites Irwin Lazar at the Burton Groupis whos recent survey shows that 5-6% of the companies looking at VoIP are interested in Open Source solutions.

The biggest challange is apparently to get community projects in front of big enterprises. Competing against Nortel, Cisco, Avaya with infinitely bigger marketing budgets is an obstacle. Another factor is migration path from existing legacy systems. OSS projects tend to be all or nothing or do it yourself.

The article argues that OSS VoIP will pick up as big names line up behind it. The comparison is with Linux, which gained traction in the business world after IBM started offering professional level support.

I tend to agree with these arguments as I have been able to witness them first hand on a number of very popular OSS projects.

Fortunately for the Mobicents community, the project is backed by big names both among telco operators and telco vendors. Portugal Telecom, Vodafone R&D, Lucent Technologies, and Aepona are among them. Some started piloting professional support for their products labeled "Powered By Mobicents".

The technology Mobicents builds on - JSLEE is designed to accomodate legacy systems. There have already been developed adaptors for proprietary telecom protocols such as SS7, which can be wired with SIP and XMPP applications running in the Mobicents environment.

I will try to clarify these facts with Doug and we will hopefully see a follow up article in the near future that adds more color to the picture.

It is interesting to hear other opinions on this subject. Do you think OSS stands a chance in IP Communications? Post a comment.

Java.net Features Mobicents - Aepona collaboration

Aepona joins Mobicents; bridges Parlay with JSLEE

Aepona Announces Full Complement of JAVA Support. The telecommunications Software Firm Works with Mobicents To Develop Open Source Parlay Resource Adapters for JAIN-SLEE.

Original article: http://www.aepona.com/press_zone/mobicents.htm.

Other related articles: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=mobicents&ie=UTF-8&filter=0

Top IMS Services

Useful survey highlighting the top 22 services that will contribute to the IMS success.

Mobicents downloads reach 1000 per month

As of today, October 25, there are 1024 downloads of Mobicents bundles for the month. This is a record number for the project. It is nearly double the number from September.

See the statistics for yourself:
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/?group_id=102670&ugn=mobicents&type=&mode=year

Mobicents Examples 1.0 Beta 1 Released

A set of practical examples is released to accompany the Mobicents server and IDE. The examples in this release feature a comprehensive Resource Adaptor Tutorial by Michael Maretzke and a practical SLEE Wake Up Call service by Francesco Moggia. Download here.