Archive for September, 2008

SIPconnect 1.1 Technical Working Group meeting getting underway today in Colorado

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

SIPconnect-1.jpgIn a few minutes out in Louisville, Colorado, at the headquarters of Cable Labs, a meeting of the SIP Forum Technical Working Group will be getting underway to work on the SIPconnect 1.1 specification. There will be about 25 people there in person ranging from SIP Forum board members to representatives of telcos, cable providers, SIP equipment vendors and even someone from Microsoft. I won’t be there in person but I’ll be joining about 15 others on a conference call connected into the room there in Colorado.

For the next day-and-a-half, we’ll be basically stepping through the SIPconnect 1.1 specification paragraph by paragraph to ensure that we can come to some degree of consensus on the various points and come out with a specification that can work for the market. You can see some of the documents created by various vendors in the SIP Forum repository although the actual document we’ll be working through is one that was sent out on the mailing list on September 22 integrating a variety of comments. (The message is in the list archive, but the attachments aren’t.)

It may sound like tedious work… and in truth some parts of it undoubtedly will be… but the end goal is to arrive at a SIPconnect specification that can be widely used in the marketplace to drive more SIP connectivity.

WHAT IS SIPconnect?

So what is SIPconnect, anyway? Essentially, it is a specification for how to connect a SIP-based system on a company’s premise (such as an IP-PBX) to a SIP Service Provider. We’re now commonly calling such a connection a “SIP trunk”. The majority of such connections will be to provide PSTN connectivity to the on-premise system.

The ultimate goal is that you will be able to purchase a “SIPconnect-compliant” premise system (like an IP-PBX) and easily connect it to a “SIPconnect-compliant” Service Provider without spending huge amounts of time doing interoperability testing (as you often need to do today). Essentially SIPconnect specifies an agreed-upon set of RFCs related to SIP that both sides agree to implement in certain ways.

SIPconnect 1.1 is in process because while SIPconnect 1.0 is out now, some issues have been identified and the SIP Forum would like to address those issues so that the SIPconnect specification can gain wider usage.

WHAT IS THE VOXEO ANGLE?

We’re interested really from both viewpoints. On the one side, we’re interested in looking at SIPconnect for Prophecy so that customers can install our software on their premise and be able to rapidly connect to a SIP Service Provider. On the other side, we’re interested in how customers can connect their on-premise IP-PBXs to our hosted application platform to be able to interact with applications running on our platform. We also have an interest on our back-end in making SIP interop easier between our SIP cloud and that of the SIP Service Providers that we connect to.

So we’re interested in SIPconnect from a variety of angles. Does this mean we’re committed to becoming “SIPconnect-compliant”? Well, not yet… we need to see how the specification comes out. But we are definitely interested in anything that makes SIP interoperability work better.

Stay tuned for more info…

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New SIP / VoIP Security tools released…

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

If you aren’t thinking about the security of your VoIP systems, you should be, because the tools to attack those systems keep getting better. Over on the Voice of VOIPSA blog, I recently wrote about the release of a new suite of security test tools that make some of the attacks now “point-and-click”.

For a variety of reasons, many of these attacks are against SIP or unencrypted RTP, so they are definitely good to understand.

P.S. Note that VOIPSA (VoIP Security Alliance) does have a lengthy list of VoIP security tools already… this new suite is just one more to be added to the list.

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A thoughtful piece on SIP as the future of telecommunications over on ZDNet blogs…

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

Over on ZDNet’s blog “A Developer’s View“, John Carroll had a surprising piece entitled “SIP is the future of telecommunications” that was really quite well-done. I say “surprising” only because I’ve been reading John’s blog at ZDNet for quite some time and can’t recall ever hearing him discuss telephony before.

In his post, he talks about his attendance at ITEXPO last week in L.A., and writes this:

One thing that has already been rolling along for quite some time, but has become extremely apparent given recent developments in the industry, is that Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) isn’t just a protocol that is “popular” in Voice over IP (VOIP) environments. It is, for all intents and purposes, THE VOIP protocol, at least among traditional telecommunications providers. It is the protocol that networks choose when they want to IP-enable their largely SS7 environments (SS7 is the signaling protocol used in the global circuit-switched network used to communicate within and between almost every telecommunications company in existence). SIP plays a central role in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a family of protocols which is supposed to define the architecture of next-generation mobile networks capable of streaming various kinds of text, voice and video data to mobile phone subscribers even as they roam between networks.

We agree. Back in 1999 and 2000, we made a decision that was viewed as rather crazy at the time to base our entire infrastructure on SIP. Our Prophecy voice application platform, our Evolution hosted developer portal, our extremely large “cloud” infrastructure… all of it is based on SIP. It was a bit of a gamble at the time, but 8/9 years later it turned out to definitely have been the right move to make then.

John goes on to talk about the power of “SIP trunking” and the many advantages it brings. It’s a good article that I’d recommend reading.

John ends with this teaser:

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a product I saw at the conference that, at first blush, I wasn’t sure I would find interesting when first invited to speak to the responsible parties. That product just so happens to come from Microsoft…and no, it isn’t Office Communications Server (OCS).

Having attended ITEXPO as well, I know exactly what he’s talking about… and I’ll say only that it has a lot to do with magic blue buttons. :-)

It’s too bad I didn’t realize John was out there at ITEXPO as it would have been nice to meet up. The irony is that I was often in the Speaker/Press Room and odds are that I probably walked right by him or saw him sitting at a table. Anyway, another time…

Meanwhile, I’ll look forward to his post tomorrow to see his take on Microsoft’s outreach there at the show.

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SIPit 23 coming up Oct 13-17 in Lannion, France – registration closes soon

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

sipit.jpgThe next SIPit SIP interoperability testing event, SIPit 23 will be October 13-17 over in Lannion, France. More information about the event – and the registration info – can be found on the ETSI page for SIPit23 (ETSI is the host for this SIPit.) We’re a big fan of interoperability test events like this because in the end they only help all of our products grow stronger and help SIP advance as a communication protocol. We’re currently planning to have someone from Voxeo over there… perhaps maybe even more than one.

If you have a SIP-based product, do consider attending – and maybe we’ll be able to test some interop together when we’re over there.

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Video: Interview with Dan Burnett on being named 2008 Speech Luminary as “Man of Standards”

Monday, September 8th, 2008

At SpeechTEK in New York City a few weeks ago, our own Dan Burnett was recognized by Speech Tech Magazine as one of the “2008 Speech Luminaries” for all his years of work on industry standards relating to speech. We were delighted for Dan to receive the (well-deserved!) recognition and I had a chance to record a brief video interview with Dan at SpeechTEK:

As Dan mentions, he is Director of Speech Technologies in our Office of the CTO (OCTO) reporting in to our CTO, RJ Auburn, and is responsible for looking at how to constantly improve our speech recognition technology and also ensure it is compliant with standards.

Congratulations, Dan, on the recognition by Speech Technology Magazine!

P.S. And yes, for those following along at home, Dan Burnett and I were both hired into the OCTO at about the same time… we thought about instituting a rule where all new OCTO employees had to be named “Dan”, but thankfully that rule was ignored with the recent excellent addition of Wei Chen!

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Posted in CCXML, MRCP, Standards, Videos, VoiceXML, Voxeo, W3C | No Comments »