Mobicents in Brno 2009 - annual team meeting aftermath

Another good year for the Mobicents community was celebrated properly with a face to face team meeting in Brno, Czech Republic. Mobicents is now 5 years old, which in human years translates to the phase of entering young adulthood.

An unforgettable week with the core team was hardly enough to fit a marathon of architecture reviews, design problem solving and roadmap brainstorming sessions. The number of new sub-projects exploded over the past year, while the more mature ones entered into competition with the market leaders. We continue to pride ourselves with the most advanced telco middleware stack that neither Open Source nor Commercial IT vendors can match in order of breadth, features and quality of integration.

Red Hat is still the FIRST AND ONLY middleware vendor to sell a telco stack that inlcudes JSLEE 1.1. (JSR 240 Certified), SIP Servlets 1.1 (JSR 289 Certified) and Media Server (soon to be JSR 309 certified).

I will have to admit though that the business part of the meeting was not the most rewarding. It was the after hours team bonding that made my stomach hurt from laughing night after night. Its absolutely priceless to witness completely improvised but highly effective team work at the social scene. In no time we had more local friends than we could handle. They were more than welcome since they balanced out our male dominant group. By the end of the week some of the new friends became so close to folks on the team that they parted ways in tears. We've done pretty well in the past years meetings, but this year set another record.

Before I go into listing the topics that we covered at the meeting, I would like to express gratitude to our hosts in Brno - Pavel Slegr and Renata Prokesova, who made sure we had a well organized, smooth, productive and entertaining week.

Here comes the information that constituted the essence of this year's get together. Following are presentations, annotated with meeting notes, including past year achievements, pending higher level decisions, and roadmap for each of the Mobicents projects. There is also information about thetentative plan for the commercially supported JBoss Communications Platform, which is based on Mobicents.

• JSLEE by Eduardo Martins
• JSLEE 1.1 Classloading by Bartosz Baranowski
• SIP Servlets by Jean Deruelle
• High Availability by Jean Deruelle
• Media Server in IMS by Amit Bhayani
• Media Server and SS7 by Oleg Kulikoff
• Presence Services by Eduardo Martins
• Diameter Server by Alexandre Mendonca
• JBCP Productization by Pavel Slegr
• Quality Assurance by Luis Barreiro
• Documentation by Jared Morgan

hSenid - officially certified JBCP partner

hSenid has officially passed the JBCP certification process and have successfully deployed JBoss Communication Platform (based on Mobicents) in production at mutltiple Tier 1 telco operators. Read the full press release:

http://www.hsenidmobile.com/latest_news.php?id=44

Official JBCP documentation available on redhat.com

The official documentation for the commercially supported JBoss Communications Platform is now available online.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/JBoss_Communications_Platform/1.0/html/ - Multi page HTML document

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/JBoss_Communications_Platform/1.0/html-single/ - Single HTML page document

Thanks to Douglas Silas Hensley and the rest of the Red Hat content team for compiling a coherent, professionally edited document from the many Mobicents wiki pages scattered on the web.

Nortel focuses on AS 5200/CS 2000. Mobicents a key component.

Several Mobicents contributors pointed to public sources revealing pieces of valuable information about a sizeable project that has been underway and is starting to make big waves.

First, this analyst review:
http://www.currentanalysis.com/teb/index.cfm?pagenav=latest&marketID=534

" Nortel revealed a refreshed IMS
strategy that focuses on the application layer of the network and is
centered around the continued sales of the company’s softswitches,
media gateways and application servers. A byproduct of the strategy
shift is that Nortel will primarily partner with third parties to
interoperate with IMS-based call control technology."

"Nortel’s IMS strategy wisely focuses on the strongest assets of the
company’s carrier VoIP product portfolio, specifically the company’s
CS 2000 softswitch. A perennial market leader, the CS 2000 continues
to attract customers that fall into the category of being ready to
migrate away from TDM switches but not ready to move to IMS. Evidence
of the CS 2000’s continued market prowess is provided by the early
March 2009 announcement that the platform is being deployed at Telekom
Austria, which services more than 2.4 million subscribers."

Then this presentation at a recent telco event in Russia:
http://www.nortelforum.ru/files/22911/Rozanov.pdf

"NGN 2.0 is about transforming the entire value
chain of the service providers' environment, focusing
on services and the three-dimensional business
aspects of technology, people and processes"

"Nortel CS 2000 Adaptive Application Engine (AAE) brings NGN 2.0 to market. Offers Open Programmability Environment (OPE) via Mobicents JSLEE. Exposes external interfaces via SOA Web Services and SIP. "

"Example deployment: Telefonica Communicator - a service for corporate customers with mobile work force. Based on Nortel AS 5200."

Expect more public announcements and comprehensive case studies along these lines.

hSenid - a Mobicents Partner success story

GSMA was a productive event for Mobicents. One of the highlights was hearing about the success stories of our partner hSenid, who built and deployed their SDP at several top tier operators. From a related press release:

"
The core of hSenid Mobile's product portfolio, mChoice TM, is built around the JBoss Communication Platform (JBCP) which complements the portfolios scalability and extendibility. hSenid Mobiles Telco grade mChoice TM Service Delivery Platform(SDP) coupled with its other cutting-edge Telco solutions, utilizes JBCP to unveil its fullest potential.
"

Read the full text of the press release here:
http://www.dailymirror.lk/DM_BLOG/Sections/frmNewsDetailView.aspx?ARTID=40660

Red Hat, Mobicents at GSMA, Barcelona, Feb 16-19, 2009

This year Red Hat will exhibit at the 3GSMA in Barcelona, the world biggest IT Event for telecommunications which takes place in Barcelona, February 16-19th, 2009.
We are located in hall 2.1, booth 2.1C73 and will have one demo-pod, where we'll show our Red Hat competency in Telco solutions. Two additional demo-pods will be covered by two partners, Akosim and hSenid, specialized in radio networks and mobile solutions, and in addition to that we will display solutions from D2See, a UK based company and Red Hat partner that provides premium video telephony services.

There is a registration page that customers and partners can use to schedule on site meeting with Red Hat experts at the event:

http://www.europe.redhat.com/mktg/3gsm/


Exhibition highlights:

• Solution framework for the telecommunication industry. Carrier grade quality platforms and solutions to Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) and Operators (Messaging, IMS/SDP, IPTV, OSS/BSS, VoiP, Network Security)
• JBoss Communication Platform (MobiCents), which integrates voice, video, instant messaging and data. MobiCents is a highly scalable, event-driven application server and the first and only Open Source platform certified for JSLEE compliance.
• Virtualisation - benefit from real saving and phenomenal performance and scalability
• Red Hat Enterprise MRG: A next-generation IT infrastructure that makes enterprise computing 100-fold faster, defines new levels of interoperability and gives customers competitive advantage by running applications and transactions with greater performance and reliability.

For any questions please feel free to contact Alessandra Moraldi <amoraldi@redhat.com>.