A frequently asked customer question is what kind of Mobicents resource adaptors are there for legacy networks - CAMEL, TCAP, INAP, ISUP and so on. Let me offer an updated view on this topic.
There are several open source Mobicents Resource Adaptors for legacy networks and there is an even bigger number of custom non-open source Resource Adaptors developed and tuned for specific customer needs. The JSLEE RA architecture has proven its value time and again.
There is a new phenomenon, which I would like to highlight here. Over the past few months, we often see discussions that refer to bridging new applications hosted on Mobicents with legacy networks by using Asterisk as a SIP gateway. These kind of discussions are initiated by developers at encumbent telecoms as well as new generation service providers.
This is turning into a trend lately, further validated by a growing number of VoIP service providers such as callwithus, future9, gafachi and others. The common delimiter between these providers in different parts of the world is that they are leveraging Asterisk for its broad set of supported legacy networks and its ability to act as SIP gateway.
Next time you are in a situation where you have to bridge Mobicents with a legacy network, you can either use a pre-built Resource Adaptor or write one yourself or maybe look at setting up Asterisk as a SIP gateway.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Mobicents becomes the First Open Source Certified SIP Servlets 1.1 (JSR 289) container
Jean, Vladimir and crew did it again!
http://jeanderuelle.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobicents-sip-servlets-is-jsr-289-sip.html
http://vladimirralev.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobicents-sip-servlets-06-achieves-jsr.html
I would like to strongly and whole heatedly encourage software vendors interested in JSR 289 certified servers to consider leveraging Mobicents. It is simply the safest bet!
Its Open Source and supports both major telco middleware Open Standards - JSLEE 1.0 and SIP Servlets 1.1. Not only that, but it is also highly reliable and scalable, with an established track record of tier 1 carrier deployments. Add on top of that a field proven Open Source Media Server. There is simply no competitor - commercial or open source that comes close to this mega bonus pack. Its a new day for telco middleware.
Vote it:
http://www.dzone.com/links/jean_deruelle_mobicents_sip_servlets_06_achieves.html
Digg it:
http://digg.com/programming/Mobicents_Sip_Servlets_0_6_achieves_JSR_289_compliance
We are growing our ecosystem agressively and would like to have you on our team. Please contact us at telco@redhat.com to set up a business partnership.
http://jeanderuelle.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobicents-sip-servlets-is-jsr-289-sip.html
http://vladimirralev.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobicents-sip-servlets-06-achieves-jsr.html
I would like to strongly and whole heatedly encourage software vendors interested in JSR 289 certified servers to consider leveraging Mobicents. It is simply the safest bet!
Its Open Source and supports both major telco middleware Open Standards - JSLEE 1.0 and SIP Servlets 1.1. Not only that, but it is also highly reliable and scalable, with an established track record of tier 1 carrier deployments. Add on top of that a field proven Open Source Media Server. There is simply no competitor - commercial or open source that comes close to this mega bonus pack. Its a new day for telco middleware.
Vote it:
http://www.dzone.com/links/
Digg it:
http://digg.com/programming/
We are growing our ecosystem agressively and would like to have you on our team. Please contact us at telco@redhat.com to set up a business partnership.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Mobicents 2008 core team meeting
A year passed since the core Mobicents team was physically together in one location. In 2007 the team was much smaller. Eduardo, Bartek, Vladimir, Amit and I met in Varna, Bulgaria to review our progress and brainstorm about the 2008 roadmap. We ended up with a few napkins with notes and a lot of hangover from the nights of barstorming.
This year we went for a different format. The team is now bigger with Alex, Jean, Luis, Oleg, and Silas joining in late 2007. With 10 people we needed some structure to the meeting. So we drafted an agenda which turned out to span 4 full work days from Wednesday to Saturday. For the curious to learn what was so much to talk about and for our own reference , the full agenda and presentations for most session is available online.
Due to the increasing market demand, we also wanted to take the opportunity and exchange knowledge with the pre-sales and consulting teams. Dunja Heinrich and Marion Roth from the Red Hat Human Capital team in Munich offered to help us with logistics so we took the offer. And, by the way, they proposed the meeting to take place during October Fest - the world famous beer festival. Offer we couldn't resist.
So we showed up in the Munich office for the first meeting day on September 17. The first half of the day we spent on cross team knowledge transfer with the Solution Architects team. In the afternoon the hard core work began with a presentation by Eduardo on the challenges of the new JSLEE 1.1 specification, which we are implementing. It is not possible to attend a presentation by this man without sidestepping into deep design arguments on class loading, deployment dependencies and other such problems that can easily put anyone to sleep. However being Eduardo and not someone else, the discussion was as much a stand up comedy show as it was collaborative design. Following JSLEE 1.1, he transitioned to the topic of Presence Services. 30 minutes in the presentation we started understanding what XDM, XCAP, Resource Subscrip
tion Management and such things stand for as we grew more puzzled with the complexity of IMS, 3GPP, OMA and related acronyms.
Next in line were Alex and Bartek with presentations on Diameter sub-projects. Authentication, Authorization and Billing started making sense until we began overlapping with Presence Services. It is still not quite clear to me when HSS is supposed to be used vs Presence Services. HSS has something to do with user authentication and service subscription management, while presence servers help users store their buddy lists. Then more complex scenarios come when both a Diameter Sh interface (offered byHSS) and an XCAP interface (offered by XDM server, part of Presence Services) have to be consulted in order for Bob to leave a simple voice message to Alice. Confusing stuff. Good thing we have the white board diagrams photographed and uploaded for reference. Confusing as it may be, AAA is a complicated problem and there is no simple solution it seems. So we will keep pressing on our support for Diameter interfaces for both JSLEE and SIP Servlets in the future.
At the end of the first day we had dinner with the marketing team, which was arranged by Anna Amoretti, who I knew from the JBoss Inc days. Thank you, Ana.
Thursday started with design discussions and roadmap planning on Diameter sub-projects. We agreed on a common POJO framework that can be shared between JSLEE Resource Adaptors and Java EE connectors for SIP Servlets applications.
Then we moved on to discuss our community documentation pages and User's Guide. I was glad to finally meet with Silas, who has been diligently transforming the hundreds of random Wiki pages sprinkle
d all over the web and often out of date or even contradicting into a coherent, easy to follow User's Guide. In the process he has also created some impressive tools, one even written in Haskell - a very interesting pure functional programming language.
We ended Thursday with a warm up session on Mobicents Media Server. Being a very important topic, it was helpful to prime the pump for an extensive discussion on Friday.
Friday was much anticipated day for me. I was truly hoping to finally meet the great talent who created from scratch in one year a product that competes with established market players. To my great disappointment Oleg Kulikoff was not granted visa by the German consulate in Moscow and was not able to join us. He drove 15 (yes, fifteen!) hours in one direction from Volgograd to Moscow for the visa appointment. What a sad thing. Made me appreciate the value of telecommunications. I also appreciated the level of bonding among the core Mobicents developers. Amit, Bartek and Vladimir who each had their name in the @author tags of the MMS source files, pieced together the picture and we were able to go through a range of important MMS issues from internal resource management to API productization and JSR 309.
The next topic was less exciting from a pure development point of view, but we knew it is of critical importance to our customers. Mobicents Management Console and integration with JBoss Operations network was covered thoroughly. Vladimir offered a competitive analisys and state of development for each JSLEE, SIP Servlets and Media Server (Bartek chipped in).
Final topic for Thursday was Quality Engineering. The army of one named Luis Barreiro went through the massive amount of machines and tools that he has deployed and customized in order to support a constantly improving test infrastructure. To get a hint of what he's done, take a look at his presentation. The live evidence for his contribution to the project is the long list of continuous build jobs. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that during the Docs session he created a daily build for the User Guide, which now ensures an always fresh online book.
Saturday is supposed to be a day for late wake up, friends, family and fun. So it was ... except the family part. It was massively energizing to hear what Jean Deruelle had to say about his baby project. Jean is one of these quiet geniuses who just get big things happen. This kind of people don't advertise their skills much. They let their work speak. Knowing Jean from his valuable contributions to the Mobicents JSLEE project back in 2005, I had an idea of his qualities, but did not realize that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Since Jean started in late 2007, he took over an initial code base started by Ranga, Bartek and Vladimir and went wild with it. A first release of MSS came out in January 2008, followed by 4-6 week regular releases after that with increasing set of features. Jean
and Vladimir are very close to some big news and I am barely holding back to give it away here...
After the official part of the meeting winded down, we geared up for the opening night of October Fest. Managed to get there around 8pm, but it was impossible to find a free table. Across the street from the fair we found a small restaurant and had dinner. From there we hit the streets and started bar hopping. Things get a little
blurry at this point (conveniently :-).
Our stay in Munich would not have been as productive as it was without Tobias Hartwig who coordinated the training session for the SA team, Daniela Koenig who accommodated our day to day needs, Werner Knoblich who offered advise on our sales strategy, and Rob Eiselt who offered insight on marketing priorities.
In conclusion, this was our biggest and most productive Mobicents team meeting ever. The community force is still with us and that keeps us going. From day 1 top priority for each of us is to look at Mobicents public forums every day and stay connected with our community. That is what determines our roadmap priorities before anything else. Commercial success is a pleasant and practical side effect that is also appreciated.
Take a look at a few photos from Munich:
This year we went for a different format. The team is now bigger with Alex, Jean, Luis, Oleg, and Silas joining in late 2007. With 10 people we needed some structure to the meeting. So we drafted an agenda which turned out to span 4 full work days from Wednesday to Saturday. For the curious to learn what was so much to talk about and for our own reference , the full agenda and presentations for most session is available online.
Due to the increasing market demand, we also wanted to take the opportunity and exchange knowledge with the pre-sales and consulting teams. Dunja Heinrich and Marion Roth from the Red Hat Human Capital team in Munich offered to help us with logistics so we took the offer. And, by the way, they proposed the meeting to take place during October Fest - the world famous beer festival. Offer we couldn't resist.
So we showed up in the Munich office for the first meeting day on September 17. The first half of the day we spent on cross team knowledge transfer with the Solution Architects team. In the afternoon the hard core work began with a presentation by Eduardo on the challenges of the new JSLEE 1.1 specification, which we are implementing. It is not possible to attend a presentation by this man without sidestepping into deep design arguments on class loading, deployment dependencies and other such problems that can easily put anyone to sleep. However being Eduardo and not someone else, the discussion was as much a stand up comedy show as it was collaborative design. Following JSLEE 1.1, he transitioned to the topic of Presence Services. 30 minutes in the presentation we started understanding what XDM, XCAP, Resource Subscrip
tion Management and such things stand for as we grew more puzzled with the complexity of IMS, 3GPP, OMA and related acronyms.Next in line were Alex and Bartek with presentations on Diameter sub-projects. Authentication, Authorization and Billing started making sense until we began overlapping with Presence Services. It is still not quite clear to me when HSS is supposed to be used vs Presence Services. HSS has something to do with user authentication and service subscription management, while presence servers help users store their buddy lists. Then more complex scenarios come when both a Diameter Sh interface (offered byHSS) and an XCAP interface (offered by XDM server, part of Presence Services) have to be consulted in order for Bob to leave a simple voice message to Alice. Confusing stuff. Good thing we have the white board diagrams photographed and uploaded for reference. Confusing as it may be, AAA is a complicated problem and there is no simple solution it seems. So we will keep pressing on our support for Diameter interfaces for both JSLEE and SIP Servlets in the future.
At the end of the first day we had dinner with the marketing team, which was arranged by Anna Amoretti, who I knew from the JBoss Inc days. Thank you, Ana.
Thursday started with design discussions and roadmap planning on Diameter sub-projects. We agreed on a common POJO framework that can be shared between JSLEE Resource Adaptors and Java EE connectors for SIP Servlets applications.
Then we moved on to discuss our community documentation pages and User's Guide. I was glad to finally meet with Silas, who has been diligently transforming the hundreds of random Wiki pages sprinkle
d all over the web and often out of date or even contradicting into a coherent, easy to follow User's Guide. In the process he has also created some impressive tools, one even written in Haskell - a very interesting pure functional programming language.We ended Thursday with a warm up session on Mobicents Media Server. Being a very important topic, it was helpful to prime the pump for an extensive discussion on Friday.
Friday was much anticipated day for me. I was truly hoping to finally meet the great talent who created from scratch in one year a product that competes with established market players. To my great disappointment Oleg Kulikoff was not granted visa by the German consulate in Moscow and was not able to join us. He drove 15 (yes, fifteen!) hours in one direction from Volgograd to Moscow for the visa appointment. What a sad thing. Made me appreciate the value of telecommunications. I also appreciated the level of bonding among the core Mobicents developers. Amit, Bartek and Vladimir who each had their name in the @author tags of the MMS source files, pieced together the picture and we were able to go through a range of important MMS issues from internal resource management to API productization and JSR 309.
The next topic was less exciting from a pure development point of view, but we knew it is of critical importance to our customers. Mobicents Management Console and integration with JBoss Operations network was covered thoroughly. Vladimir offered a competitive analisys and state of development for each JSLEE, SIP Servlets and Media Server (Bartek chipped in).
Final topic for Thursday was Quality Engineering. The army of one named Luis Barreiro went through the massive amount of machines and tools that he has deployed and customized in order to support a constantly improving test infrastructure. To get a hint of what he's done, take a look at his presentation. The live evidence for his contribution to the project is the long list of continuous build jobs. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention that during the Docs session he created a daily build for the User Guide, which now ensures an always fresh online book.
Saturday is supposed to be a day for late wake up, friends, family and fun. So it was ... except the family part. It was massively energizing to hear what Jean Deruelle had to say about his baby project. Jean is one of these quiet geniuses who just get big things happen. This kind of people don't advertise their skills much. They let their work speak. Knowing Jean from his valuable contributions to the Mobicents JSLEE project back in 2005, I had an idea of his qualities, but did not realize that it was just the tip of the iceberg. Since Jean started in late 2007, he took over an initial code base started by Ranga, Bartek and Vladimir and went wild with it. A first release of MSS came out in January 2008, followed by 4-6 week regular releases after that with increasing set of features. Jean
and Vladimir are very close to some big news and I am barely holding back to give it away here...After the official part of the meeting winded down, we geared up for the opening night of October Fest. Managed to get there around 8pm, but it was impossible to find a free table. Across the street from the fair we found a small restaurant and had dinner. From there we hit the streets and started bar hopping. Things get a little
blurry at this point (conveniently :-).Our stay in Munich would not have been as productive as it was without Tobias Hartwig who coordinated the training session for the SA team, Daniela Koenig who accommodated our day to day needs, Werner Knoblich who offered advise on our sales strategy, and Rob Eiselt who offered insight on marketing priorities.
In conclusion, this was our biggest and most productive Mobicents team meeting ever. The community force is still with us and that keeps us going. From day 1 top priority for each of us is to look at Mobicents public forums every day and stay connected with our community. That is what determines our roadmap priorities before anything else. Commercial success is a pleasant and practical side effect that is also appreciated.
Take a look at a few photos from Munich:
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Mobicents looking for A+ Product Manager
Things around Mobicents continue to keep us very busy. An area where we feel growth pain is Product Management. The amount of incoming leads and interest in the commercial JBoss Communications Platform is calling for a dedicated top-notch Product Manager who can handle the following responsibilities:
- JBCP business plan: target market segments, customer categories, revenue projections, competitor analysis
- Go to market strategy: formulate value of packaging Mobicents open source projects into JBCP commercial offerings; follow up with sales team on recognizing opportunities and delivering the message
- Marketing collateral: create and feed to sales, pre-sales and marketing teams globally
- Product Requirements: work with customers to capture requirements for future product and services improvement
- Operational: maintain product offerings in internal systems such as sales portal SKUs and support portal entries
- Partner ecosystem: refine and execute on partner ecosystem plan
- Product Awareness: identify key industry events to participate in; inform leading industry analysts of product progress; publicize achievements in business press
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Mobicents at JavaOne 2008
Tuesday May 6 was a big day for Mobicents. The two
sessions at the JBoss booth were overflowing. There were 3-4 times more people than chairs for both sessions delivered consequently by Vladimir and Jean. The live demos were both impactful, especially the facebook plugin demo where two people of the audience were able to talk to each other on mobile phones.
The Red Hat media team also recorded a podcast and
posted it on jboss.org.
In the midst of the presentations we were approached for a purchase order by a sizeable call center company in the San Francisco area.
See the crowd around Jean during his sesion. I am listening carefully since most of what he says is news to me. Mobicents SIP Servlets is growing just too fast. Vladimir is answering questions in the back to someone who watched his presentation.
sessions at the JBoss booth were overflowing. There were 3-4 times more people than chairs for both sessions delivered consequently by Vladimir and Jean. The live demos were both impactful, especially the facebook plugin demo where two people of the audience were able to talk to each other on mobile phones.
The Red Hat media team also recorded a podcast and
posted it on jboss.org.
In the midst of the presentations we were approached for a purchase order by a sizeable call center company in the San Francisco area.
See the crowd around Jean during his sesion. I am listening carefully since most of what he says is news to me. Mobicents SIP Servlets is growing just too fast. Vladimir is answering questions in the back to someone who watched his presentation.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Mobicents JSLEE or Mobicents SIP Serlvets: Which one is better?
Religious arguments over alternative technologies can be fun...for a few days. Then they become wasteful. Instead of taking sides, we decided that it is important to encompass the largest possible community of developers.
The Mobicents team now offers implementations of both JSLEE and SIP Servlets. Jean Deruelle, Ranga M, Vladimir Ralev, Bartosz Baranowski and other members of the core Mobicents team built the SIP Servlets (JSR 289) implementation from scratch in less than 3 months. As can be expected it shares many of the underlying components with the existing JSLEE SIP Resource Adaptor, most notably the JSIP open source stack from NIST.
Web developers who are still shy to open the doors of the VoIP realm will find it easiest to prototype using SIP Servlets. As their needs grow with the sophistication of their converged applications, they will reach to JSLEE, which has an advanced programming model optimized for solving communications problems and a rich palette or Resource Adaptors covering a variety of telco protocols.
What is next? As we're acquiring experience with Java EE, JSLEE and SIP Servlets, we are thinking about a unified programming model. It should be intuitive to add voice and video features to an application based on EJB3 and Web Beans. Some early work shows that this is possible and we are confident it won't take long before the open source community rallies around a unified model. Join the discussions.
The Mobicents team now offers implementations of both JSLEE and SIP Servlets. Jean Deruelle, Ranga M, Vladimir Ralev, Bartosz Baranowski and other members of the core Mobicents team built the SIP Servlets (JSR 289) implementation from scratch in less than 3 months. As can be expected it shares many of the underlying components with the existing JSLEE SIP Resource Adaptor, most notably the JSIP open source stack from NIST.
Web developers who are still shy to open the doors of the VoIP realm will find it easiest to prototype using SIP Servlets. As their needs grow with the sophistication of their converged applications, they will reach to JSLEE, which has an advanced programming model optimized for solving communications problems and a rich palette or Resource Adaptors covering a variety of telco protocols.
What is next? As we're acquiring experience with Java EE, JSLEE and SIP Servlets, we are thinking about a unified programming model. It should be intuitive to add voice and video features to an application based on EJB3 and Web Beans. Some early work shows that this is possible and we are confident it won't take long before the open source community rallies around a unified model. Join the discussions.
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