Jingling call control

Third party call control is what makes applications such as "click-to-call" possible. Although I will not qualify "click-to-call" of killer application, its potential in traditional commerce or support applications is undeniable. In essence, third party call control is a must have when the communication sessions are managed by just more than individuals.

Although until recently third party call control was the guarded property of large telecom vendors, a new breed of call control gateway has made its appearance. These devices bridge Microsoft's LCS world with the open source world of Asterisk, and provide a way for the Office communicator client to control the open source IPBX:

• Use Office Communicator as a soft-phone to place calls, deflect calls, forward calls through Asterisk.
• Receive incoming call notifications, see who is calling and reroute to an alternate number.

Obviously I do not feel this kind of device important because of what they do for the Microsoft closed products, but rather because they do it through the use of a standard protocol. Office Communicator has a built in support for the ECMA-323 standard, which is also known as CSTA XML. CSTA in its binary disguise has been around telecom vendor's equipment for a while. But I am ready to bet that its XML version will gain more and more traction as it allows a much easier and quicker integration between communication equipments and business applications.

In the context of Jingle, supporting different forms of call control is mandatory if the protocol is to see adoption beyond the narrow context of peer-to-peer direct communications. And I believe that looking to integrate CSTA XML and Jingle is the way to go.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jingle, Call control, IPBX, Phone system, Antecipate

IPBX 2.0 anyone?

Andy Abramson had a struck of genius last night: he suddenly discovered that IPBX has a future in enterprises.

The future for Asterisk in my mind will be built upon adoption in the enterprise, not by small five to ten end point deployments

For all it is worth, I was under the impression the acronym meant something like "Private Branch Exchange", which does not hold any presumption on the size of what/who is privately using the exchange. As a matter of facts, nothing is precluding enterprises of any size to fall into that category.

Now one may ask why it has not happened yet, and why only "small five to ten end point deployments" are using Asterisk? Because Asterisk’s architecture is nothing but a POTS PBX with IP connectivity. In essence, it is similar to all the big telecom vendor's PBX offerings such as [add you favorite model from Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, etc… here], when they added VoIP support adaptors to make them "IP communication ready". At the core, these systems were still entirely subject to the tyranny of the "numbering plan". A rather rigid dependence, which is far from the flexibility provided by Internet's URIs.

In the end, Andy is right, the future of IPBX is in the enterprise, but any marketer fresh out of school would have said the same. On the other hand, I believe Andy is wrong and, because of its outdated architecture, Asterisk will not be wining this race. In my opinion, FreeSWITCH is a much better candidate to the title of IPBX 2.0 in the enterprise. It is build around the concept of what I would call a ubiquitous "signalling router" which captures the distributed nature of the Internet. Because of its routed architecture, this IPBX can be easily assembled in PBX grids and offer a host of standard IP signalling protocols for interoperability with many real-time communication and presence enabled systems. And obviously it knows how to bridge different media streams…

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jingle, VoIP, SIP, IPBX, Phone system, Antecipate

FreeSWITCH has got a clue

The FreeSWITCH project is reaching maturity, and I whish they manage to get their first release out to be presented at ClueCon.

From what I know of its architecture, it possesses all the ingredients for a real internet wide distributed voice system. As such I believe FreeSWITCH would have to be seriously considered as the voice platform of choice to complement XMPP. The philosophy driving their concept of distributed platform bodes well with the XMPP federation cloud. But above all, beyond the necessity to provide early solutions, they really understand the difference between Jingle and Google Talk.

I just hope they fix their registration procedure so I could get a build to run on my Windows server…

Technorati Tags: XMPP, Jingle, Jabber, VoIP, IPBX, SIP, Session signaling, Antecipate