Speaking of Standards

Last November, Skype announced that they were seeking a someone to head up the Skype Developer Community program. I wrote about this over on my DisruptiveTelephony blog and Jim Courtney wrote a more detailed piece on his Voice on the Web site. Jim quoted – and agreed with – my statement:

For those of us watching the emerging communication/telephony space, we’ve seen Skype make several different attempts over the years to create a successful developer program. Given their incredible user base and platform, it’s been curious to see that they haven’t yet found the right formula.

Skype has tried several times to create a strong developer program. In fact, we here at Voxeo were part of one of the first early attempts, their “Voice Services” program back in 2005 which eventually faded away. We still are huge fans of Skype, use it heavily internally and are very pleased that we are able to provide inbound Skype connections to voice applications on our platform. We want Skype to succeed.

So I was immensely pleased when, a bit over a month ago, Skype announced that they were hiring CounterPath CTO Jason Fischl as their Director of Developer Relations to head up their Developer Program, among other tasks. Through my work in the IETF and meeting at various events, Jason and I have become friends and so I was personally thrilled for him to step into this role. He is a smart guy with great communication skills. His work as CTO of CounterPath, arguably the largest provider of softphones out there (probably mostly known for X-Lite, but producer of many others), has given him a great view into softphone technology. And through all that, he has a wealth of connections into the developer community. Hiring Jason was a great move on Skype’s part.

What is interesting to look at from a standards point-of-view, though, is that in the hiring of Jason, Skype also imported some solid and current SIP-related credentials. Jason has been very active in the real-time communication area of the IETF – the area that deals with the SIP protocol – and has been involved in many of the IETF working groups in the area.

In fact, he is currently one of the co-chairs of the Basic Level of Interoperability for SIP Services (BLISS) Working Group whose aim it is to facilitate basic interoperability between SIP endpoints (hardphones, softphones, etc.). Primarily BLISS is aiming to solve the issue that SIP allows multiple ways to do things (such as signal “Do Not Disturb”) and different vendors have implemented different mechanisms. BLISS is trying to help make the interop cleaner. The working group is also where some cool new work like a RESTful API for automated call handling is being developed.

Jason is also the lead author on the Internet-Draft about using Secure RTP over DTLS, which has been identified as “the way forward” for establishing secure, encrypted media sessions between SIP endpoints to replace today’s reliance on ’sdescriptions’. (After a lengthy series of meetings/discussions and something like 13 other proposals including Phil Zimmermann’s ZRTP.) Assuming Jason continues his IETF work and this document proceeds to becoming an RFC, there will be an amusing bit of irony to have the IETF’s main method for secure media co-authored by someone at the proprietary Skype. (Although in truth Skype has a huge SIP backend infrastructure for PSTN connectivity.)

Jason is also the editor of a highly-regarded draft on a certificate management system for SIP and has been involved with a number of other drafts. All in all he’s got very solid SIP credentials and background in open standards and open source. He’s a good guy to have at Skype and I certainly wish him all the best on coming up with Skype’s nth Developer Program. We look forward to seeing how it evolves (and seeing how we can work with the folks at Skype).

Not that I’m setting high expectations or anything… okay, Jason?

---

UPDATE: There’s also an interview with Jason up on YouTube about his new role.

---

If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider either subscribing via RSS, becoming a fan on Facebook or following us on Twitter.

---

Technorati Tags: skype, jasonfischl, developers, sip, ietf

Related posts:

1. Skype announces “Skype For SIP” to provide SIP connectivity to premise systems
2. P2P SIP – an effort to make a open standards/SIP version of Skype?
3. EComm2008 – Jonathan Christensen of Skype and the “unrealized” vision of SIP…
4. Did AOL just become the biggest SIP fanboy on the block?
5. P2PSIP and pushing voice down into local clouds…

Tags: SIP, Skype

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.