[SR-Users] Evariste Systems to drop Kamailio market, become Acme Packet VAR

[Daniel-Constantin Mierla]

It might be too late for you guys, as Kamailio Consortium decided to buy 
Oracle asap. The move was planned for few years, not really related to 
the latest Oracle acquisitions, but for protecting the future development.

The companies behind the consortium acknowledged that current 
scalability model, the high pace of development and innovation should be 
reconsidered. Needing a Raspberry Pi for handling several hundreds call 
setups per second is no longer appropriate, therefore the architecture 
has to be changed to meet today's operators expectations of 35 call 
setups per second on high end servers (i.e., minimum 128 CPU cores and 
4TB memory).

As a result, the consortium is looking to rewrite Kamailio in Java. 
Buying Oracle, which is owning the Java technology, keeps the project 
safe from potential future troubles on patents or trademarks. The full 
new architecture of Kamailio is yet to be disclosed -- next are few 
elements just to open your appetite:
      - will run as many fusion reactors as needed to be able handle and 
merge SIP particles that form a transaction or dialog in a non blocking way
      - access to SIP message attributes and script variables will be 
done through CORBA service - for example, that should allow to 
dynamically change and use SIP parsers, without restart, and even rely 
on humans. Practically you will be able to dictate in real time to kamailio
      - execution of routing script will use Java RMI to call functions 
from core or modules - therefore the modules can be distributed across 
many nodes, including toasters or coffee machines that are always around 
in data centers, with lot of spare CPU

Selection of Java was a laborious process, other alternatives being 
found with clear disadvantages on portability, for example:
   - python - white space indentation for controlling statements is a 
portability stopper - for example, many have different background colors 
and it is not defined what should happen when statements are indented 
with black, blue, green or whatsoever color spaces. Even worse, the 
space can be multicolor, therefore investigating thoroughly the 
portability for all combinations of spaces is not feasible
   - ruby on rails - the track gauge differs for rail systems in various 
country - for example, developing Kamailio on rails in Germany will not 
run in Russia. Not to mention that rails technology could be deprecated 
soon, in favour of NGNv5.0 maglev

So guys, no matter where you want to run away, Kamailio will be the one 
to open the door there and welcome you in!

Cheers,
Daniel

On 4/1/13 11:04 AM, DanB wrote:
> Interesting ... I have been considering this option since a while now.
>
> Alex are you having good channels within Oracle, can you maybe 
> sub-license?
>
> DanB
>
> On 04/01/2013 12:33 AM, Alex Balashov wrote:
>> For immediate release:
>>
>> ATLANTA, GA (1 April 2013)--Evariste Systems LLC, an Atlanta-based
>> consultancy specialising in Kamailio-based VoIP infrastructure solutions
>> for the ITSP and CLEC market, has announced that beginning in the second
>> quarter of 2013, it will be abandoning its Kamailio-based technology
>> portfolio to focus on its new role as a preferred VAR (Value Added
>> Reseller) for Acme Packet (NASDAQ:APKT).
>>
>> "It is with a heavy heart that we abandon five years of 
>> Kamailio-oriented
>> work and the Canonical SIP Routing Platform product derived from it,"
>> said Alex Balashov, the principal of the company.
>>
>> "However, the reality is that investment in open-source VoIP technology
>> is a dead end.  From a technological point of view, we have lagged very
>> badly in meeting the needs of today's sophisticated VoIP market, and 
>> it's
>> time to cut our losses.  Asterisk, Kamailio, FreeSWITCH--all this stuff
>> just hasn't kept up with the pace of evolution of 3GPP, ETSI, and ITU
>> standards.  We are tired of saying 'sorry, we don't support IMS or
>> H.323' to our resultingly dwindling customer base.  Does anyone
>> actually run an all-SIP network?"
>>
>> Starting in early April, Evariste will begin providing value-added
>> consultancy related to the implementation of the Acme Packet Net-Net
>> Session Director.  In Balashov's view, "the Net-Net SD is the only
>> product capable of meeting the perimeter security, routing and peering
>> needs of today's VoIP service delivery environment."
>>
>> Fred Posner, the director of Team Forrest, a Palner Group integration
>> and consultancy operation based in the Jacksonville, Florida area,
>> agreed:
>>
>> "SIP is a tiny piece of the telephony puzzle. The big boys of
>> ClueCon [an interoperator revenue-sharing consortium] want 
>> DIAMETER-based
>> interdomain peering policy control, H.323, MGCP, and IMS.  IMS is pretty
>> much how VoIP architecture is done now.  We got out of the Asterisk
>> business just in time, right before Mitel swallowed the PBX world.
>> I'm glad to see Evariste is finally seeing the light, and I'm sure its
>> shareholders are too."
>>
>> Posner also believes Evariste's lack of support for TDM interfaces
>> accounted for dwindling market share.
>>
>> "Have you seen CSRP?  It's SIP in, SIP out.  Real inter-LATA haulers
>> and application service providers use TDM and leave SIP for things
>> like voicemail.  I can't plug my DS3s into a SIP proxy, so I just
>> don't think there was any real demand for the sort of thing they
>> were doing."
>>
>> Noting Oracle's US$2.5bn acquisition of Acme Packet in early February,
>> as well as its more recently announced buyout of Tekelec, a Siris
>> Capital Group portfolio company, Balashov remarked: "The obvious
>> shift to an Oracle-centric telephony paradigm was a kind of validation,
>> if you will, of our decision to unload our dead weight and sign on
>> to the revolution in unified communications."
>>
>> Sean McCord, of CyCORE Systems, an Atlanta-based software consulting
>> house and long-time Evariste creditor, agreed that there was a natural
>> synergy between Evariste's shift to Acme Packet and Oracle's dominance
>> of telephony infrastructure.
>>
>> "Oracle is a forward-thinking telecom pioneer," McCord said.
>> "The telephone is Oracle, and Oracle is the telephone."
>>
>> Balashov also noted that a tightening regulatory environment and new
>> consumer protection rules helped hasten the decision to embrace the
>> more professionalised Acme Packet product portfolio.
>>
>> John Knight, Senior Engineer at Hendersonville, NC-based Ringfree
>> Communications, one of Evariste's oldest channel partners, said:
>> "As one of Evariste's long-time disties, we were jittery about exposure
>> to CALEA and the QA requirements of large call centers.  We tried to
>> make do, but at some point we just had to put the relationship on
>> stop.  I'm all in favour of open, but there's just no open-source
>> software out there that does call recording, and that's the bottom line
>> for us.  In the end, we had to restructure some debt just to get
>> bondholders to let us source a proprietary solution on tick."
>>
>> In a thematically related move, Evariste will be dropping its heavy
>> use of the open-source PostgreSQL database manager for its rating and
>> reporting tools.
>>
>> "The business case for standardising on Oracle's databases could not be
>> clearer.  With Oracle Database 11g's support of warehousing and OLTP,
>> the real mystery is why we didn't go there sooner," said Balashov.
>>
>> Carlos Alvarez, a director at Televolve, a growing Phoenix-area VoIP
>> operator, recently spearheaded a move away from Evariste's PostgreSQL-
>> based call detail record (CDR) storage solution to one running atop
>> Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
>>
>> Alvarez commented: "Evariste had a nice idea, in a cute, 
>> David-and-Goliath
>> kind of way, but we're processing over five hundred phone calls a day
>> now.  Are we really going to store those kinds of volumes in an
>> open-source database?  Might as well just put it all in flat text
>> files at that point.  Phone service is an uptime game. You can't
>> compromise on this stuff. What if someone needs to call 911?"
>>
>> Asked to summarise his expectations, Balashov said: "I hope this 
>> turns us
>> around in a big way.  We were wrong to think that nobody cared about
>> stuff like P-CSCFs, or that you could deliver even rudimentary VoIP
>> to the premise without the expansive feature set of a comprehensive
>> solution like the Net-Net SBC.  I can only hope the market forgives us
>> for betting on 'SIP Express Router' and its ilk back in the day, and
>> gives us a chance to do it right in round two."
>>
>> Fred Posner, of Team Forrest, added: "Besides, if you look at the Git
>> repository, Kamailio hasn't had any code contributions in at least five
>> years. It seems everyone's figured out this pure SIP stuff is defunct
>> and hokey."
>>
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>
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-- 
Daniel-Constantin Mierla - http://www.asipto.com
http://twitter.com/#!/miconda - http://www.linkedin.com/in/miconda
Kamailio World Conference, April 16-17, 2013, Berlin
  - http://conference.kamailio.com -