Speaking of Standards

Ever wondered what the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF) was all about? Or did you not even know it existed? Over on NoJitter.com, Dave Michels published a great interview today, “UCIF Chairman Aboba Opens Up“, with Microsoft’s Bernard Aboba who is the President of the UCIF Board of Directors.

The interview is well worth a read as it provides insight into why UCIF was founded and what the organization aims to do. The UCIF mission is a good one and I applaud any organizations that can help encourage more interoperability between vendors and systems. In the end, we as users win when communications systems are unlocked from proprietary lock-in!

Do you create hardware or software that uses the SIP protocol? If so, what are you doing the week of May 17-21, 2010? Over in Stockholm, Sweden, many vendors will be gathering for the SIPit 26 interoperability testing event – and registration is still open if you are interested in attending. I’ve written in the past about SIPit events and even recorded a video interview last fall about why SIP interop matters. These events are important… and if you develop SIP-related software, I strongly encourage you to attend.

This SIPit26 event is, as always, organized by the SIP Forum and hosted by Edvina in cooperation with Tandberg, Intertex, Ingate and .se! More info can be found at the SIPit 26 site at:

http://sipit.edvina.se/

Courtesy of organizer Olle Johansson, this SIPit 26 event can also be found on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Olle, coming out of the Asterisk community, also wrote up a great post on “why SIP testing is important to Asterisk and to you“… the reasons he lays out are the same for really any of us working with SIP-related products and services.

This particular SIPit 26 event will have an additional aspect to it… the SIP Forum has partnered with the IPv6 Forum to promote testing of SIP over IPv6. Actually, the partnership is larger than that… but a specific outcome is that part of the drive of SIPit 26 will be to test how well SIP implementations work over IPv6. All good stuff… and help move along real-time communication over the Internet.

If you do have a SIP-based product or service, check out SIPit 26 and get there if you can… it’s a great opportunity to test your products and see how they work with other SIP-based products and services.

On Monday over on the Emerging Tech Talk video podcast, I posted a brief interview with SIPit coordinator Robert Sparks that I recorded at the SIPit 25 event held in September 2009 at the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab (IOL) in Durham, NH, USA.

In the interview, we covered questions such as: What is the SIPit test event all about? How does it make communications systems better? What do participants do at the event? How can companies get involved?

More information about SIPit can be found at http://www.sipit.net/
Robert Sparks has also posted a summary of the SIPit25 event at:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rai/current/msg00720.html

From a Voxeo perspective, I know that our test team gained some valuable insight into interoperabilty with products from other vendors. We’ll be incorporating what we learned into future versions of our product. Getting this type of real-time feedback is why the SIPit events are so powerful. We definitely hope that other vendors will join in to future SIPit sessions.

Meanwhile, here is Robert Sparks…

Technorati Tags: sip, sipit, ietf

SIPit 25 starts four weeks from today at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab (IOL). What is SIPit? As the UNH-IOL page for the event says:

SIPit’s, or Session Initiation Protocol Interoperability Tests, are weeklong events where people bring their SIP implementations to ensure they work together. SIPIT Events are open to anyone with a working SIP implementation. The goal of the events is to refine both the protocol and its implementations. The SIPIT events are a driving force shaping SIP into a globally interoperable protocol for real time Internet communication services.

Basically, they are a place where vendors can privately test their SIP implementations against each other. Results of the testing are not publicly released – other than an aggregate news release talking about what occurred overall. It’s a place where, as a vendor, you get a great chance to see how well your SIP-based product interoperates with that of other vendors. It’s also a place where vendors will often bring early implementations of new SIP standards to test those against other vendors working on early implementations. All in all, it definitely helps with moving us all along the path toward increasing SIP interconnection.

We’ll have a Voxeo team at this SIPit. We’ve been based on SIP since we started our company back in 1999 and we’re continually looking at ways to increase our performance and support for evolving SIP standards. We value the feedback we gain from these SIPit events and try to attend when we can.

You can attend, too, as there is still space available. The UNH IOL event page has more info and there is an online registration form as well. (Deadline to register, though, is September 4th.)

P.S. And yes, since yours truly lives about two hours west of UNH, I *am* planning to head over and meet our testing team for dinner probably in beautiful Portsmouth, NH… I’m in “marketing” now, so they don’t let me near the test equipment. I mean, in my world, all the tests just work, right? And they have really pretty charts to go with them…