Monday, January 12, 2009

Interview with Perry Ismangil re:SIPit and Other Cool Topics

BTW, first, I'll be meeting 1000s of my best friends in the unified and converged IP communications and everything in between or that supports any of those at WWW.ITEXPO.COM Feb 2-4, 2009 in Miami Beach, FL. Sign up as soon as you can to join us in fun, real business networking and sharing of brilliant minds and movers and shakers in our industry. Perry is one of them! He's also in my Facebook and Linkedin networks. Lucky me.

For those who believe they are lost in the world of open source and converged and unified communications, and the relation among different acronyms, technologies, platforms, softwares, and protocols...

I interviewed several industry experts and leaders to bring simplicity and understanding. Today's highlighted guru is Perry Ismangil. He will never say he is an expert, but he is.

1. How would you categorize the following terms: PJSIP, SIPit, OpenSer, Asterisk, FreeSwitch, SofaSwitch:

Answer: First a note that OpenSER has now forked (see
http://blog.pjsip.org/2008/08/04/openser-project-is-dead-welcome-to-kamailio-and-opensips/)

PJSIP, OpenSIPS, Kamailio, Asterisk, FreeSwitch, SofaSwitch are all part of the IP communications ecosystem:

- PJSIP will be typically implemented on the client side while OpenSIPS, Kamailio, Asterisk, FreeSwitch, SofaSwitch will be server
side.

- PJSIP implements many protocols needed to participate in IP communications, such as SIP, SDP, RTP and NAT Traversal (including STUN, TURN, and ICE).

- Technically you don't need any servers if you know the direct destinatination, a client can call another client

- But of course in the real world you need a globally recognized 'id' or 'number'. And also interfaces to other communications systems such as the 'legacy' telephone network.

- SER, OpenSIPS, Kamailio is classed as 'SIP Proxy' and provides many functions including registration.

- Asterisk, FreeSwitch, SofaSwitch is the equivalent of PBX in the analog world. They are so called IP-PBX.

- SIPit (SIP Interoperability Test) is where all the SIP development community (some of software above attends) meet up and try to interconnect and interoperate to each other. It is a twice yearly event. So far we've been to the last three SIPit across three continents: China, USA, and France. The next one will be in Japan.

2. The completeness of ... http://www.pjsip.org/links.htm

Answer: I can't claim it is complete, but I guess it's a fair representation of
what's out there. Although that probably needs updating now, we haven't looked to much for recent stuff.

3. Tell us about your path to where you are now in business geekery. ;-)

Answer: I started as a university lecturer but very soon, with a University friend, was also co-founding one the first open source business in Indonesia, building Linux-based products. I was purely the tech guy back then. However I recall I already had 'marketing' ideas, such as the original company name was shortened to be more catchy.

Then I moved to the UK, and became a full time 'corporate software developer', where you're part of a huge team. That was fun, because it was a 100% Microsoft shop, so I learned a lot, especially on being a software toolsmith.

Then I met another friend from University days, this time it was the other way around. He got the product, it was open source, and was looking for a biz guy. So it was onto my 2nd open source startup. I had to ramp up very quickly on the basics of biz, like accounting, sales, and marketing. Luckily the open source project is a good lead generation tool so I can learn on the job.

Also because I have been on the Internet for a long time, it was quite natural for me to learn marketing and sales on the Internet, as a result I went straight to doing Internet marketing and closing sales over email -- two of the hottest thing at the moment!

The biz is now run 100% on hosted web apps (see http://l.teluu.com/bizviaweb for what I currently use).

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