Kamailio 2010 Awards

Here we are, the 4th edition of Kamailio Project Awards, granted for activity during 2010.

The past year was full of events and achieved very important milestones set for our project. First of all was the release of version 3.0, the first as a result of the integration between Kamailio and SIP Express Router (SER), the two being since then one application - see more about 3.0 release here.

More over, another major release was done in 2010, v3.1, worked out by an enlarged development team, brought a big list of new features, including full asynchronous network communication (even TCP and TLS) - see more about 3.1 release here.

All together, 2010 was great, therefore the awards got two new categories - Innovation in Communications for those using Kamailio for services beyond voice and Academic Environment for using Kamailio in research and educational networks.

I was not able to list everyone I wished, trying to stick to the tradition of having each of the category with two winners, listed in alphabetic order. As a rule, I tried to choose people and companies that were not selected in the past editions, but of course I want to thank to everyone contributing to and using Kamailio during 2010.

Let the show begin...

Blogging:

• Venture VoIP – very good coverage of Kamailio (OpenSER) & Asterisk related news, like the integration tutorials between the two open source telephony applications. Web link: http://www.venturevoip.com/news.php
• VoIP Today – VoIP news site always keeping an eye on our project activities, publishing news about our releases and major events around the project. Web link: http://www.voiptoday.org

Related Projects:

• SEMS - (aka SIP Express Media Server) programmable and lightweight SIP back to back user agent and media server written in C++, offering features such as signaling B2BUA, Voicemail, audio conferencing, SBC, IVR, a.s.o. The project shares many developers of Kamailio and it has the roots in the same research institute as Kamailio and SER, FhG FOKUS Berlin, Germany. Web link: http://www.ipterl.org/sems/
• SIP:Provider – full featured VoIP servicing platform using Kamailio for SIP routing, offering web management interfaces for administration and users. Among features: postpaid billing, call forwarding, call blocking, speed dial, voice mail, click-to-dial, peering, least cost routing - click here for more. Web link: http://www.sipwise.com/products/spce/

Technical Support:

• Alex Hermann - one of the community members that spotted corner case issues and came with detailed report and patches most of the time. In addition he added enhancements to newly XAVP concept and provided straight answers on our mailing lists. Alex works for SpeakUp, Netherlands
• Timo Reimann - omnipresent at our developer meetings and events as well as on our mailing lists. His development involvements brought many modules, such as dialog, to better structure. Timo works for 1&1, Germany

New Contributions:

• app_lua - the new module allows execution of embedded Lua applications. The latest enhancements to this module allowed writing a pretty complete Kamailio configuration for SIP routing only in Lua, see this page for it. You can see also a presentation done at Fosdem 2011 about Twitter Notifications from Kamailio Configuration - click here for it. Web link: http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/stable/modules/app_lua.html
• presence_conference - this module came as a result of Google Summer of Code, successfully completed by Marius Ovidiu Bucur. Done together with SIP Communicator (btw, the best cross-platform open source SIP softphone I met so far), this extension based on RFC 4353 and 4575 added to our SIMPLE Presence implementations, which along with the newly added embedded XCAP server makes Kamailio the most complete SIMPLE Presence Server implementation that can be found in the open source world. Web link: http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/stable/modules_k/presence_conference.html

Developer Remarks:

• Carsten Bock - member of Kamailio Management team, working for Telefonica O2, Germany, Carsten worked lately a lot with dispatcher, dialog and usrloc modules, plus the newly started efforts to the IMS extensions.
• Marius Ovidiu Bucur - the new developer landed in our project as a result of participation to Google Summer of Code. A student at Polytechnics University of Bucharest, working now part time for 1&1, Marius continued to contribute to Kamailio's SIMPLE Presence server, his latest work to this component focused on increasing the scalability (the code already in our GIT repository).

Advocating:

• Fred Posner - I had the opportunity to meet Fred personally during the last year, a person that carries an amazing bag of experience in VoIP and security. Fred continuously helped in promoting Kamailio, on mailing lists, IRC channels and public events. Besides that, his baker skills are visible at amazing good looking and tasteful cakes by Dream Day Cakes (and yes, I did taste some of them during my last trip in USA, thanks Fred & Yeni - but just trust me, don't look to their site, after that it might be too late and it may cost you a lot by not being able to stop yourself keep ordering).
• Olle E. Johanson - probably it is not really much to add about Olle, the VoIP Olle. However, last year Olle conducted super-human efforts to keep SIP world ahead in communications. Kamailio was always a part of that. I mention here only a few of them: SIPit in Stockholm (organized by Olle himself) where Olle and I setup Kamailio based TLS and IPv6 testbeds to be used by anyone attending there. His VoIP Forum articles kept heads up in regards to IPv6 and security in SIP, then, his involvement made possible the switch to SIP in the entire Portuguese educational network, running now about 300 pairs of Asterisk and Kamailio - deployment presented by Ruben Sousa at Astricon 2010.

VoIP Services:

• Flowroute - early adopter of Kamailio, Flowroute, acting mainly as a SIP interconnect broker and providing quality VoIP routes, keeps pushing the SIP server towards innovation, always looking for better performances and proper security in regard to attacks and fraud detection. Flowroute is also actively involved in promoting Kamailio project, hosting related events at their premises. Web link: http://www.flowroute.com
• XtraTelecom – Spanish telephony provider focused on enterprise market, offering SIP trunking services along with hosted PBX’s. With Inaki Baz Castillo in their team, member of Kamailio's management as well, XtraTelecom relies on a capable group of engineers that can only ensure quality of service. Web link: http://www.xtratelecom.es

Business Initiatives:

• NG Voice - the team coordinated by Carsten Bock working with IMS extensions in Kamailio, also developing other IMS infrastructure applications. It is a new initiative with a lot of potential in business environment in the near future. Web link: http://www.ng-voice.com
• TeamForest - every year, the number of companies offering Kamailio services is growing in USA. Knowing now them personally, TeamForest is another company that you can trust theirs skills in deploying Kamailio and offering professional support services. Web link: http://www.teamforrest.com

Events:

• Cluecon - after missing the 2009 edition, being busy in that year to complete the integration between Kamailio and SER, the 2010 edition was amazing for me. In the first day only, Kamailio was present directly in 5 presentations (one by myself), plus a demo done by Phil Zimmermann using iptel.org sevice which runs SER flavour of our project. Purely amazing for me! I was able to catch up with many members of Kamailio community and FreeSWITCH developers. Web link: http://www.cluecon.com
• LinuxTag - the event taking place in Berlin offered Kamailio the chance to have a booth at the exhibition and a presentation at conference track done by Henning Westerholt. All together we were about 15 Kamailio developers and community chatting with visitors, other open source developers and projects present there. Henning featured also an interview in German for RadioTux - listen the podcast here. Web link: http://www.linuxtag.org

Academic Environment:

• Illinois Institute of Technology - School of Applied Technology - Chicago, IL, USA - they conducted a set of research projects with Kamailio involved (one very interesting is the performance benchmark - click here for results in pdf). Web link: http://voip.itm.iit.edu
• Zilinska University - Slovakia - they published a set of useful tutorials about how they use Kamailio inside the university, see more at: http://nil.uniza.sk/sip/kamailio. Web link: http://nil.uniza.sk

Innovation in communications:

• Ifbyphone - a provider of voice applications for customer interactions - relying on cloud based services to offer call tracking, dynamic inbound call routing with IVR screening, outbound call automation, virtual call center applications and a highly flexible family of API based integration tools. With two presentation at Cluecon by Irv Shapiro and Robin Rodriguez, they showed usage of Kamailio beyond the classic telephony (e.g., video of the talk Web Enabling Voice Applications with Kamailio). Web link: http://www.ifbyphone.com
• NextIX - an innovation company that specializes in universally available information and communication technology solutions. At Astricon 2010, they presented “Asterisk, Kamailio, Openfire and Social Media Integration” - another way of using Kamailio for voice and beyond that. Web link: http://www.nextixsystems.com

As of Personal Facts related to the project, this time I want to underline the release of several complete tutorials, such as: integration with Asterisk or FreeSwitch, scanning attacks protection or SIP SIMPLE Presence server - see all of them at:

• http://kb.asipto.com/kamailio:index.

This is it for 2010. If you want to check the previous turn of awards:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.com/2010/02/kamailio-openser-2009-awards.html