The SIP Center - A portal for the commercial development of SIP Session Initiation Protocol / News and Events / 2004 January Newsletter

The SIP Informer - January 2004

CONTENTS:

(SIP Overview whitepaper in Chinese)

London Bridge JAIN Tech Day - A Smashing Success!

SIP Forum Certification Working Group

An update on the evolving "Session Controller" space

LDAP An Unsung Hero of the IP Communications Revolution
REGULAR FEATURES:

This month's new SIP Products showcased in the Virtual SIP Trade Show
New and Popular Titles in The SIP Center Bookstore
Top 5 Whitepaper Downloads

Events Diary
SIP Center Principal Sponsors
Sponsorship Information
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Wise words

"If you have built castles in the air,
Your work need not be lost;
That is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them."

- Henry David Thoreau

Notice of planned server down time

13th January 2004 >>> The SIP Center test server will be unavailable from 10:00 - 12:30 (GMT)

We are upgrading the SIP Application Server to the latest software version. The server will be offline for this time.

If you haven't yet had a chance to try out the test server on The SIP Center, why not give it a go? You can test User Agents and other software or devices or other proxies against it. We have documented the capabilities and the how to's. Support and FAQ's are available to help you out.

sipcenter.com/testarea

The SIP Center server and its' ongoing maintenance is a contribution to the SIP community from Ubiquity Software Corporation. Ubiquity founded The SIP Center in July 2000 to provide SIP developers with a resource and testing facility to help them to work towards improving the development of SIP technology.

About Ubiquity's SIP Application Server:

As the next-generation service delivery network continues to emerge, converged applications will drive service providers' infrastructure deployments as well as their revenue. Ubiquity's SIP Application Server is both a carrier-class deployment platform and a programmable, standards-based application-creation environment (ACE) that allows providers to develop, roll out and host these next generation services.

Carrier-Class Performance and Application-Creation Expertise in One Simple Solution >>>
http://www.ubiquitysoftware.com/products/SIP_Application_Server.php

(SIP Overview whitepaper in Chinese)

The SIP Center has many visitors from China and we are very pleased to support this important part of the community with some resources in chinese. I regret that I can't write this to you in chinese!

If anyone knows of any other papers or resources in chinese about SIP that we can add to The SIP Center, please e-mail the Editor.

The following page is encoded in simplified chinese and pdf documents are availabe from here >>>

sipcenter.com/aboutsip/understanding_sip.html
Contributed by Ubiquity Software Corporation

London Bridge JAIN Tech Day - A Smashing Success!

Over 75 people representing the Global JAIN Community crowded into the Sun London Bridge office to hear about the latest in JAIN Technology: JAIN SLEE, JAIN SIP, and future JAIN APIs. Because of the pace of JAIN Technology, the very obvious passion of the JAIN Community, and the audience overflow, another JAIN Technology Day is now scheduled for Munich on February 12th. European service providers such as British Telecom, France Telecom, Mobilkom Austria, Orange, Three, and Vodafone packed in to hear about the latest JAIN SIP and JAIN SLEE trials and deployments as well as API development on Instant Messaging, Presence, SIP for J2ME, and SIP Servlets.

Siemens shared their architecture of SIP Servlets within a 3G network, Nokia presented details of SIP for J2ME, Basevoice covered JAIN SIP, and Open Cloud, jNETx, and Vodafone dove deeply into JAIN SLEE. The day ended with serious networking at the local pub across the street. The slides from the London Bridge conference are located at http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/JAINTechDay

The next JAIN Technology Day is scheduled for February 12th, Munich, Germany.
Invitation (PDF) >>>

Space is limited and it's FREE, so Register NOW via email

December JAIN Community Newsletter

2003 was a great year for JAIN SIP and, as we move into 2004, JAIN SLEE is picking up momentum. Read the latest updates on the JAIN JSR's, news, resources, and JAIN technology and commercial developments.

sipcenter.com/files/SUN_JAIN_Community_Newsletter_December.pdf

Learn all about the JAIN Initiative by visiting http://java.sun.com/products/jain, the most up to date public resource exploring a variety of activities relating to JAIN technology.

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SIP Forum Certification Working Group

Earlier this year, The SIP Forum created a working group to promote the continuous development of SIP interoperability, interoperability test cases and the creation of testing frameworks that can be used to confirm compliance with the identified test cases.

There are a lot of interoperability problems out there and up until now this issue hasn't been addressed in a structured way. The SIPit events, whilst being extremely useful for the debugging of SIP products, being private do not allow open pooling of experiences in a manner geared to improving interoperability as a whole. What's more there have been a number of disparate efforts to develop SIP test products and to offer "pseudo" certification services.

With Trefor Davies of PurplePacket and Jiri Kuthan of iptel.org as co-chairs the SIP Forum Certification Working Group aims to make the whole activity an inclusive public exercise. The idea is that the whole industry will be able to benefit from the output by making use of the test cases and tools that will be freely available. Whilst no one can probably ever 100% guarantee interoperability under all conditions the test cases produced by the SIP Forum should be seen as the best available for the job as they will be based on the industry's pooled real world experiences of SIP systems rollouts and from attendances at SIPit events.

The initial work is targeted at producing a set of basic tests for SIP User agents by the February SIPit. This is then expected to expand to more complex test scenarios and to follow the requirements of the industry as SIP matures and evolves.

Interested parties Subscribe to the SIP Forum Certification Working Group list by sending an email with the word subscribe to the address sipforum-certificationwg-request@lists.su.se.

Mailing list archive >>>

An update on the evolving "Session Controller" space

The VoIP industry is now moving from IOC and CLEC deployments to large incumbent carriers. As VoIP deployments grow in size, so does the need for call processing power and scale. IP-to-IP Gateway is the term used by Tier One carriers to define the features and requirements for VoIP Interconnection. Session Controllers are a sub-set of this since they only do pieces of the puzzle and not at high performance rates. An IP-to-IP Gateway is a critical network element, not just a firewall/NAT appliance.

As you know, early session controllers emphasized signaling or software functionality as an extension to a softswitch; with the primary need being firewall, NAT and protocol translation. Capacity requirements from carriers were low and therefore easily met.

Read the full article >>>

~~~ <<< SIP INFORMER REGULAR FEATURES >>> ~~~

LDAP An Unsung Hero of the IP Communications Revolution
An Alcatel Whitepaper

New demands for access to information - at any time, from any device, anywhere - depend on directory services such as Internet-based (TCP/IP) interaction with LDAP.

A communications revolution is underway that is reshaping how corporations are structured, how healthcare is delivered, how education is accomplished, and how governments serve their citizens. This revolution is driven by access to information at any time from any device, and from anywhere. Directory services play an important role in providing information access across town or around the world. These services depend on Internet-based (TCP/IP) interaction with the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

Protocols and applications - such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and voice extensible mark-up language (voice XML or VxML) - enable voice communications with multiple devices and the Web itself. An application's ability to find someone regardless of his/her location and to send instant messages or deliver a voice call relies on access to several sources of information. Multiple directories perform in the background ensuring critical information is available to these applications regardless of device or location.

LDAP is involved with many directory operations that require access to information such as customer preferences, patient information, student records and public records. Anyone who has had to manage multiple user logins and passwords is already fairly familiar with LDAP, and LDAP will figure prominently in Directory Enabled Networks (DEN). DEN is an effort by vendors and developers to simplify the management of increasingly large and complex networks through the use of directories.

Read the full whitepapaer>>>

New SIP Products showcased in the Virtual SIP Trade Show

Here are the changes and additions to SIP Center products section this month. Updated daily and with more than 350 company listings, the Virtual SIP Trade show is the most comprehensive SIP products directory on the web. You'll find further information about these companies and their SIP products at the Virtual SIP Trade Show:

Quintum Technologies - Tenor MultiPath VoIP Switches - Easiest Installation with Voice Quality Assurance
SIPquest Inc. - SIPquest provides SIP software components for equipment manufacturers
AG Projects - NAT traversal application for IPTEL's SIP Express Router
Access Networks India Pvt Limited - SIP based SoftGateway/SoftSwitch/IVRs/ACD
Linkbit, Inc. - Integrated SIP, H.323 and PSTN testing with your laptop

There are many more new and updated SIP products this month but due to the holiday season, they won't be added to the Virtual SIP Trade Show until next month. Stay tuned for the bumper edition in February with all the latest SIP products and technology to hit the market.

List your product here for free!

More SIP Products >>>

SIP Press releases >>>

Popular titles in The SIP Center Bookstore

Many of these items are eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping from Amazon.com

Sip Demystified

Voice-Enabling the Data Network: H.323, MGCP, SIP, Q.S, SLAs, and Security

Internet Communications Using SIP

SIP: Understanding the Session Initiation Protocol

See The SIP Center Bookstore for more SIP books and reports >>>

SIP Center whitepaper library >>>

Events diary

International SIP 2004
January 20 to 23, Paris, France.

3G Mobile Forum
13th - 16th January 2004, Tokyo, Japan.

SIPiT
February 8-13

TMCNET INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO Miami 2004
*~* AND SIP WORKSHOP *~*
February 11-13, 2004, Miami, FL, USA.

More events listings >>>

SIP Center Principal Sponsors (click here)

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More than 14,000 people subscribe to The SIP Informer newsletter and we know that these are the key people in this industry who specifically visit the site for new product and service information. Engineers, CEO's, CTO's, CMO's, Architects, Analysts, Consultants, and many more are regular visitors to the site and are reading this newsletter right now.

Sponsors of The SIP Center have direct communication with these highly targeted readers. If you have a SIP product or service, you should consider joining forces with The SIP Center for a very effective way to get your brand and message exposed.

Please call or e-mail Kathleen Misson for further information.

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Sponsorhsip information >>>

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