Kamailio – Winner Of Google Open Source Peer Bonus Award

Recently Google announced the first group of Open Source Peer Bonus Award winners for 2019 and we are thrilled to see Daniel-Constantin Mierla and Kamailio among them.

The Google Open Source Peer Bonus program is described as:

In the same way that a Google Peer Bonus is used to recognize a fellow Googler who has gone above and beyond, an Open Source Peer Bonus recognizes external people who have made exceptional contributions to open source.

The announcement for the 2019 winners is available at:

• https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/04/google-open-source-peer-bonus-winners.html

Daniel and Kamailio are listed among open source developers and projects that have a relevant impact out there, like Linux Kernel, Kubernetes, Angular, Pip, LLVM/CLang, Apache projects, Git or Gerrit.

We are glad to see Kamailio recognized in this way for its contribution to open source real time communications ecosystem!

Thanks for flying Kamailio!

Kamailio – Open Source Excellence Award At SimCon 2019

We are delighted to announce that Kamailio project was awarded the “Open Source Excellence” prize at SimCon 2019, ceremony hosted by Rachel Riley (twitter – wikipedia) and Simon Woodhead (twitter).

From their announcement:

Kamailio were awarded ‘Open Source Excellence’, a key reason being the superb management of the project. Kamailio is used within huge networks and really is the secret weapon of many modern telcos. It is open source and, in the judges’ opinion, one of the best run projects around.

This recognizes the enormous effort made over more than 15 years by the development team and the community to keep Kamailio at the top of open source SIP/VoIP server applications, with a well defined development process and project organizing procedures.

With key targets such as flexibility, robustness, security and scalability, Kamailio continued to bring constantly a consistent set of new features with each major release (19 of them, from SER 0.8.x to Kamailio 5.2.x) and consolidated the trust in being a reliable application that can be used from start-ups to large established telcos and mobile operators.

It is actually a double celebration, because Fred Posner (twitter), one of our most prominent community members and advocate, was also awarded — citing: a genuine ‘Pre-Posthumous Legend’, a selfless, long standing contributor and supporter of the open-source community who has never sought the limelight.

Thank you SimCon for the award and Simwood for supporting the project for so many years!

We look forward to Kamailio World Conference 2019 and hoping to meet many of you there!

Thanks for flying Kamailio!

Kamailio 2016 Awards

Here we are, the 10th edition of Kamailio Awards granted for the activity related to Kamailio and Real Time Communications during the previous year, respectively 2016. Continuing the tradition, there are two winners for each category, also past winners were skipped from initial selection.

As a side remark, this edition was a bit postponed as I was considering to do a different kind of awards given that last year Kamailio project celebrated 15 years of development and this is the 10th edition of the awards, but finally went for the classic fomat, leaving the special edition for another occasion in the near future.

The 2016 was filled with plenty of important events, from the release of Kamailio v4.4.x series in March 2016, to Kamailio World 2016 in May and the celebration of 15 years of Kamailio development in September, along with the participation to other world wide events such as Mobile World Congress, Fosdem, Astricon or Cluecon.

The 2017 is keeping up very well so far, the major release series for Kamailio 5.0.x is out, Kamailio World Conference 2017 is like a month and a bit away. The next major release series, respectively v5.1.x, looks very good so far, after one month of development there are three new modules, and another one waiting for merge in the review process of a pull request. Definitely keep an eye on Kamailio project during this year, a lot of new stuff is cooking right now!

Back to the awards, here are the categories and the winners!

New Contributions

• ims_ocs - provides an implementation for Online Charging Server, which communicates via Diameter-Ro interface with ims_charging module, being developed by Carsten Bock. The IMS/VoLTE set of extensions in Kamailio keep growing.
• rabbitmq - an AMQP connector for kamailio.cfg using RabbitMQ, developed by NG-Voice and  Stefan Mitittelu. The module allows to exchange messages with other RabbitMQ peers directly from kamailio.cfg.

Developer Remarks

• Holger Freyther - he contributed the ss7ops module along with improvements to sipcapture and mysql modules. The ss7ops module can convert ss7 to json format, which can be then inspected inside kamailio.org via json or jansson modules
• Spencer Thomason - he contributed a consistent set of patches for Solaris/Sparc architecture and portable endianness macros

Advocating

• Sebastian Schumann - an early adopter of the project since more or less the SER times, Sebastian has been a promoter of open source technologies for RTC inside telecoms, highlighting the benefits at many events world wide, including Kamailio World 2016.
• Werner Erkisen - trying to disrupt big telecoms from inside with Telenor Digital, Werner has been highlighting how open source projects, including Kamailio, can speed up the time to prototype and roll out new services in telecom market

Technical Support

• Franz Edler - he has been very responsive on questions related to the IMS extensions offered by Kamailio, providing a getting started guide and virtual machine images for a basic IMS deployment.
• Phil Lavin - he has helped to improve the presence extensions in Kamailio, with many patches, testing and reviews as well as answering the questions on mailing lists.

Blogging

• VoIP-News.gr - a news aggregator site, promoting most of Kamailio announcements and related blog posts. For someone with a busy agenda, the site is a good source for learning what's new in the VoIP space.
• VoIPNow (4PSA) - an extensive number of articles about adding various features to kamailio.cfg or managing kamailio, mainly targeting the VoIPNow platform, but easily reusable for any other Kamailio deployment, among them: Fail2ban integration, TLS options, Sipcapture Integration, DoS detection, options to troubleshoot kamailio.cfg, etc.

Related Projects

• CDR-Stats -  an open source CDR (Call Detail Record) mediation rating, analysis and reporting application for Kamailio as well as Asterisk or Freeswitch, working also for Sipwise SIP:Provider. The project is managed by one of Kamailio's old friends: Areski Belaid. 
• ivozprovider - a multitenant solution for VoIP telephony providers designed for horizontal scaling and load balancing. It relies on Kamailio as a SIP routing server for security and scalability, and on Asterisk 13 with pjsip channel for media services.

Business Initiatives

• Nimvelo - a UK-based internet phone service provider, the company is managed by Charles Chances, one of the very active Kamailio developers, with many contributions to distributed message queue, replication to hash tables and presence
• VoIP Lab - a Berlin-based co-working space initiative managed by Dennis Kersten, targeting VoIP professionals, aiming to offer a place to meet the people with similar interest, create the premises for joining the efforts and collaborate on large RTC projects

Events

• FUSECO Forum - an yearly event organized by Fraunhofer Fokus Research Institute about the new trends, developments and impacts of 5G/IIoT and related technologies, with the 7th edition in autumn of 2016.
• TAD Summit - the Telecom Application Developer Summit (TADS) took place in Lisbon, by mid of November 2016, event coordinated by Alan Quayle. If working in telecom and not familiar yet with TAD events, you should just do it, the series of events where a lot of innovation in Telecoms is done.

Friends Of Kamailio

• Allison Smith - known as the voice of Asterisk, being around the project from its first versions, a constant presence at various events around the world, more or less at each Astricon. Her collaboration from the early phase of VoIP with PBX integrators to provide the high quality voice prompts allowed them to expose a professional feel of the open source PBX solutions, especially at the times when open source in telecom was pretty much disregarded, which definitely helped to go into and disrupt this market. More over, although Kamailio doesn't handle media streams, Allison recorded a jingle for Kamailio back in 2008 when the project got the name.
• Tim Panton - he has probably touched most of what can be done in real time communications, from serious use cases such as building scalable telecom API platforms to the funny side of interacting with toothbrushes (and other toys) via WebRTC. Seen very often at events such as Kamailio World, Astricon or Cluecon, Tim typically likes to expose how RTC concepts can help to innovate in unexplored/new fields such IoT/IoE.

This is it for 2016. If you want to check the previous turn of awards, visit:

• http://blog.miconda.eu/2016/03/kamailio-2015-awards.html

Looking forward to meeting many of you soon in Berlin, during May 8-10, 2017, at the 5th edition of Kamailio World Conference & Exhibition, an opportunity to discuss face to face with Kamailio Project developers.

Note: I am solely selecting the winners, with no involvement of Kamailio project members, based on what I observed and has risen my interest during 2016.  Also, a rule that I try to enforce is that a winner of a category in the past will not be awarded again same category (a winner one time is a winner for ever).

Kamailio 2014 Awards

Here we are, the 8th edition of Kamailio Awards granted for the activity during the previous year, respectively 2014. Continuing the tradition, there are two winners for each category.

The Kamailio project continued to grow in number of contributions and add plenty of new features. The second edition of Kamailio World Conference and the major release of version 4.2.0 are among highlights of 2014.

Next are the categories and the winners!

New Contributions

• statsd - provides native integration with statsd and graphite from Kamailio configuration file, allowing to publish statistics from Kamailio runtime environment and build graphics that makes the monitoring process easier. The module is developed by Eloy Coto Pereiro, from Foehn, UK
• tsilo - provides a mechanism to add new branches to not-yet-answered calls while other branches are still active. For example, in the world dominated more and more by mobile networks, the module enables Kamailio to forward the INVITE to a new endpoint that just registered (e.g., triggered by a push notification) event the INVITE was routed before to a different destination (e.g., desk phone). The module is developed by Federico Cabiddu, from Orange Vallee, France

Developer Remarks

• Lucian Balaceanu - from 1und1 AG - besides the work on the modules published over the time by 1&1,  he has the merits of being interested into the core components, providing several important patches on handling SIP replies via onsend route as well as pushing new features to modules such as acc, siptrace and sipcapture
• Luis Azedo - from 2600hz.com - the main developer for kazoo module, he provided valuable feedback and patches for improvements and new features to many other modules, such as presence, db_text, registrar and usrloc

Advocating

• Alex Balashov - from evaristesys.com - long time community member and developer of the project, Alex spent consistent resources traveling within and outside of USA for promoting Kamailio, relevant for 2014 would be Cluecon and Kamailio World conferences
• Giacomo Vacca - from rtcsoft.net - sharing a lot of useful information via his blog (like deploying Kamailio with Puppet or within Docker containers), Giacomo had a year very rich in traveling as well, covering Kamailio World, Cluecon and Astricon, presenting about automatic deployments of Kamailio

Technical Support

• Charles Chance - running Sipcentric Ltd, UK - he is an active developer, with many contributions to distributed message queue (dmg) and other components such as htable or registrar, Charles has been helping very often on mailing lists
• Will Ferrer - from switchsoft.com - very active on users mailing list, with good reports and troubleshooting of problems reported by others. He has been helping many to sort out their issues and get their Kamailio running smooth

Blogging

• beingasysadmin.wordpress.com - with blog posts for Kamailio deployment for IM and integration with FreeSwitch. Besides these, the site has couple of articles that are very useful for people managing realtime communication platforms
• loadmultiplier.com - it has a interesting set of blog articles related to Kamailio and IMS. Given that IMS has a complex architecture, any share of knowledge is very useful. As LTE is being deploying world wide as a fast pace, the Kamailio and its IMS extensions can help in deploying the VoLTE service

Related Projects

• Elastix - an open source unified communication server has now a variant targeting large deployments, packaged with Kamailio as SIP routing proxy and Asterisk for PBX telephony services
• Kazoo - an open source, scalable, distributed, cloud-based telephony platform that allows to build powerful telephony applications with a web management interface and a rich set of APIs to extend and integrate with other systems. Its telephony engine is built using Kamailio and FreeSwitch

Business Initiatives

• IT Center Portugal - known also for their deployment of several hundreds of Kamailio-Asterisk pairs offering unified communications services for the Portugal academic network, IT Center has built a VoIP core platform with Kamailio routing the SIP traffic, relying on OpenStack to offer the elasticity to scale based on load demands
• Toky.co - a venture from Carlos Ruiz Diaz with support by Wayra, Telefónica's startup accelerator, Toky is leveraging WebRTC technology for offering communication services without the hassle of installing applications. Kamailio with its websocket module is used for routing signaling between WebRTC endpoints.

Events

• AstriDevCon - somehow attached to AstriCon, the AstriDevCon is actually the top day within that week for developers working with IP telephony technologies. One of the rare moments within an year where you find a high density in the same room of people that have the experience and can find a solution for anything going wrong in real time communications
• KazooCon - the Kazoo project has a fast growing community, fuelling it with an event orgaized by 2600hz.com at the heart of IT industry: San Francisco - Silicon Valley. Embedding Kamailio, Kazoo has become a choice for those willing to start with an out of the box telephony system and enhance it with more features offered by Kamailio.

Friends of Kamailio

Awarded to people not necessarily working directly with Kamailio, but whose activity has a good impact on the project and open source real time communications.

• Matthew Jordan - he became a respected leader of Asterisk project in very short time, creating a new vibe around the development of the project, in a time of consistent refactoring for Asterisk application. The success to transform a big project to cope better with the new models of communications is demonstrating once again that one can rely on open source for long term business and not be afraid of being stuck with unmaintained or old technologies. Irrelevant to say that he supported always the efforts to make Kamailio-Asterisk integration simpler and clarify the role of the applications in real world deployments.  
• Peter Saint-Andre - he is one of the people that bridged (and still does it) the open source communities and standardisation bodies over a very long period of time. Getting involved in standardisation process is something that open source should do more, because it can ensure that their development model is protected and practical specifications are standardized instead of hypothetical and over complicated concepts. With open source being driven a lot by immediate needs and standardisation bodies caught a lot in bureaucratic and theoretic approaches, Peter's activity is really remarkable. Although mostly involved in XMPP, he has worked a lot on the specifications for SIP-XMPP interworking, welcoming always Kamailio when presenting about this topic. 

This is it for 2014. If you want to check the previous turn of awards, visit:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.com/2014/03/kamailio-2013-awards.html

The activity within Kamailio project during 2015 so far is very rich, check the project web site for announcements on what is new and the plans for the future.

Looking forward to meeting many of you soon in Berlin, during May 27-29, 2015, at the 3rd edition of Kamailio World Conference & Exhibition.

Kamailio 2013 Awards

Here we are, the 7th edition of Kamailio Awards granted for the activity during the previous year, respectively 2013. The ceremony follows the same rule, two winners per category.

With two major releases across 2013, respectively v4.0.x and v4.1.x, and having our first dedicated conference for Kamailio project, making the decisions for these awards was harder than ever so far.

Ladies and gentlemen, next are the categories and the winners!

Blogging

• Kristian Kielhofner - blog.krisk.org - a veteran in VoIP, with consistent activity over the years in Asterisk, FreeSwitch and Kamailio, Kristian wrote many good technical articles, even inspiring the development of gzcompress module in Kamailio
• Jose Luis Verdeguer - blog.pepelux.org - (Spanish) a comprehensive tutorial about creating a SIP honeypot with Kamailio. Jose is involved in securecall.org, a project aiming to provide a service for secure communications

Related Projects

• baresip - an open source, bsd licenses, full SIP stack and soft phone, able to handle signalling over IPv4/IPv6 UDP, TCP and TLS, with support for ICE, TURN as well as audio and video. The project is developed by Alfred E. Heggestad, who did many contributions to SER and Kamailio over the time
• lumicall - an open source Android softphone targeting to provide similar experience to proprietary Viber service, using your own SIP server or the one hosted by the project. The main developer is Daniel Pocock, a person with vast activity in open source real time communication projects and a promotor of Kamailio

Technical Support

• Daniel Tryba (pocos.nl) - very active on mailing lists, he has been assisting many people to sort out SIP routing issues with Kamailio
• Vitaliy Aleksandrov (wildix.com) - involved in users and developer forums, he provided many patches approaching quite complex corner cases for TCP and WebSocket extensions

New Contributions

• rtpproxy-ng - by Richard Fuchs (sipwise.com) - the new generation of the module controlling the RTP relay application, typically used for NAT traversal. The control protocol reuses bencode format, allowing to extend it easier. The main target is usage together with mediaproxy-ng from Sipwise, a replacement for old RTPProxy, which also has the capability of encrypting/decrypting RTP streams to allow classic SIP phones to communicated with WebRTP endpoints (afaik, SDES implemented (but deprecated by IETF, still supported by some versions of web browsers) and DTLS on the way)
• mohqueue - by Robert Boisvert - rather interesting new module, allowing to use Kamailio for building call queues. A media server is needed only for playing music on hold, Kamailio taking care of queue management. Now your turn to build thousands of queues and blog about!

Developer Remarks

• Camille Oudot, Orange France - he joined the development team, helping to improve and maintain the large set of IMS related modules
• Victor Seva, Sipwise, Austria - one of the most active developers during past years, touching various areas such as core, debugger, app_lua, registrar and usrloc, documentation and packaging

Advocating

• Alan Duric - on of the pioneers in VoIP and co-founder of Telio in Norway, involved in many ventures related to real time communications, Alan was supporting and using our project from the early years of SIP Express Router
• Victor Pascual Avila - involved quite a lot in standardisation groups, Victor keeps referring to Kamailio for many new specifications we have implemented, such as SIP over WebSocket for WebRTC, at the events he participate across the world and via webrtchacks.com blog

Products and Services

• Bezeq - the main telecom company in Israel - if you ever thought that Kamailio has limitations on what one can do with it, approach Uri Shacked from Bezeq and see how he designed an IVR system using Asterisk as simple DTMF detector and Kamailio doing the business logic for the IVR menu
• Voxbone - the international DID provider based in Belgium - had the courtesy of contributing back to Kamailio project the module for handing SIP-I/SIP-T message, via Torrey Searle who became a registered developer of our project

Business Initiatives

• Gonicus, Germany - gonicus.de - a company focusing on using open source technologies, deploying IP telephony systems to large enterprises
• 2600hz, USA - 2600hz.com - offering a hosted PBX service relying on Kazoo platform (which combines Kamailio and FreeSwitch), recently including mobile network integration, thus a straightforward way to become MVNO in USA

Events

• AstriCon - celebrating 10 years of existence, AstriCon 2013 gave the chance for many Kamailio developers and users to meet last autumn in Atlanta. It was really a great show, with presentations related to Kamailio from Peter Dunkley, Klaus Darilion and Daniel-Constantin Mierla (aka me), surrounded by friends such as Fred Posner, Alex Balashov, Olle E. Johansson, Torrey Searle, Randy Resnick and the entire Asterisk crew
• Kamailio World - it was our first edition of a dedicated event for Kamailio project, touching technical aspects and the business environment around it. With participants from across 5 continents, our expectations were exceeded and we are looking forward to the second edition to happen soon in Berlin, during April 2-4, an edition already with more confirmed participants and content

Academic Environment

• University of the Aegean, Karlovassi, Greece - www.aegean.gr - involving Kamailio in academic activities, such as the article A Privacy-Preserving Entropy-Driven Framework for Tracing DoS Attacks in VoIP (pdf), presented at International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES Conference)
• University of Florida, Gainesville - www.ufl.edu - involving Kamailio in academic activities, such as the article A Distributed IP-Based Telecommunication System Using SIP, published in International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications

Friends of Kamailio

• Dan York - with a long record related to VoIP security, he does and extensive work at Internet Society in promoting new, better and more secure technologies for real time communications, such as IPv6, TLS/encryption, DNSSec. Dan constantly advertised Kamailio at world wide events and online articles about implementations of those specifications .
• David Duffett - running Telespeak UK and acting as Community Manager for Asterisk, David has been always highlighting the benefits of using Kamailio and Asterisk together as complement applications to get the best of what can be deployed for specific needs of large real time communication platforms.

Definitely 2013 wasn't with bad luck for Kamailio at all and 2014 looks very well so far -- keep an eye on the project for getting latest news and updates on development and events world wide where you have have the chance to meet other kamailians.

This is it for 2013. If you want to check the previous turn of awards, visit:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.de/2013/02/kamailio-2012-awards.html

Looking forward to meeting many of you soon in Berlin, during the 2nd edition of Kamailio World Conference & Exhibition.

Kamailio 2012 Awards

This blogging festivity came to its 6th edition, Kamailio Project Awards, mainly granted for the activity during previous year, 2012. Following the rule of past years, each category has two winners.

Overall, the 2012 was the year where the number of contributors and development activity for Kamailio SIP Server exploded comparing with previous year (e.g., over 20 brand new modules). The first half of 2012 was filled with development and release of major version 3.3.x, the other half with development of soon to be released v4.0.0. Beside lots of new and appealing features (e.g., websockets support, embedded msrp relay, IMS extensions), v4.0.0 brings a single set of modules, the duplicates being removed, marking the finish of Kamailio - SER integration.

Ladies and gentlemen, next are the categories and the winners!

Blogging:

• Carlos Ruiz Díaz - http://caruizdiaz.com - active community member, publishing even a consistent contribution recently, his blog contains useful information, many posts related to C code development for Kamailio.
• Luis Martin Gil - http://www.luismartingil.com - managing a blog offering a nice set of handy tips and scripts for VoIP and not only, he has submitted few C code patches for Kamailio as well.

Related Projects:

• Jitsi - a truly open source softphone project coordinated by Emil Ivov, very rich in features, including video conferencing, instant messaging and presence, desktop sharing. Kamailio and Jitsi collaborated in the past in common public projects such as Google Summer of Code. Used together, the two application offer flexible alternatives to paid or walled garden services such as Skype or Google Hangout.
• JsSIP - one of the pure JavaScript libraries for SIP, mainly developed by Jose Luis Millan in collaboration with one of our community members, Inaki Baz Castillo. JsSIP in the browser and Kamailio as signaling server (through its new-in-v4.0.0 websoket module) enable WebRTC browser to browser calling without any additional component. The two were used together to test protocol interoperability and help others add WebRTC support in their applications.

Technical Support:

• Klaus Darilion - involved in community for very long time, being also part of management board, Klaus was a very active presence in our forums, helping many users to sort out complex scenarios and advanced SIP routing needs.
• Victor Seva - for taking the challenge and time to follow up Debian distribution policies, polishing our packaging specs and code, bringing Kamailio back as an official package of Debian project.
  

 New Contributions:

• cassandra connector - contributed by Anca Vamanu of 1&1 AG, the module generated high interest from the community, in a world demanding more scalability and high availability of services.
• websocket transport layer - without doubt the hottest topic nowadays is WebRTC. Thanks to Peter Dunkley of Crocodile RCS, Kamailio was among the first server applications supporting websockts as transport protocol, allowing browsers to call between them using SIP as signaling protocol. The new feature became quickly an high attraction, being used thoroughly during interop testing and prototyping of innovative WebRTC services.

Developer Remarks:

• Jason Penton - more than 10 new modules related to IMS specifications have been pushed during last year by Jason who is working for Smile Telecoms. It makes Kamailio one of the most advanced IMS platforms out there, and I am not referring to open source space only.
• Ovidiu Sas - another veteran member of the project, Ovidiu (working at VoIP Embedded) had a large amount of contributions last year. Besides new modules such as xhttp_rpc and xhttp_pi, he spent a lot of time to enable cross compilation in Kamailio's build system.

Advocating:

• Luis Guaman - for participating at Cluecon 2012, Luis, who is running Interlancompu.com, presented how to use Kamailio for providing location-based services, as component of their Find Me And Chat service.
• Nir Simionovich - for managing the presence of Kamailio at Astricon 2012 exhibition, taking care of project's booth and promotional activities. Nir is running GreenfieldTech, being involved in open source VoIP for many years.

Products and Services:

• System One NOC - actively involved in the community via Javier Gallart and contributing code via Vicente Hernando to scalability components such as Redis connector, System One NOC is using Kamailio to handle routing for large number of DIDs and provide redirect services.
• Truphone - started during OpenSER times as an innovative service to cut roaming costs and bring convergence between GSM and IP worlds, Truphone continues its adventure in real time communications bringing out new services that increase user experience and benefits.

Business Initiatives:

• Edvina - run by well known open source VoIP and IPv6 advocate Olle E. Johansson, Edvina has expanded the set of services related to Kamailio, increasing as well its activity in contributing code and documentation to Kamailio project.
• Voxygen - run by Dean Elwood, one of the VoIP pioneers launching the voipuser.org SIP service many years ago, Voxygen is one of the businesses out there relying on Kamailio to create new products and services for companies that look for innovation in communications. (Side note about voipuser.org: website is still down due to hard drive crash on web server, but SIP service is still up and running (served by Kamailio v4.0.0 at this very moment)).

Events:

• ITSPA UK Awards, London - the yearly awards festivity organized by UK's Internet Telephony Service Providers Association grated Members' Pick award to open source telephony projects. The event took place at the House of Commons Members Dining Room, Palace of Westminster, London, on 21st of March 2012, hosted by Dr Julian Huppert MP, Vice Chair of the Parliamentary Internet Communications and Technology Forum. Besides picking the award, I had the chance to meet many companies involved in VoIP and RCS, discovering more use cases of Kamailio.
• UC Expo, London - while this event had its own fair amount of content related to VoIP and SIP, last year we had in the evening a quite big gathering of folks around our project and not only, including people from Truphone, Crocodile RCS, Localphone, Digium/Asterisk (e.g., from Mark Spencer to James Body)

Academic Environment:

• University of Oslo - an active presence within the project community, via Øyvind Kolbu, the involvement of this university helps propagating the usage of our project in academic world.
• University of Pennsylvania - with another attractive contribution, the SCA module authored by Andrew Mortensen, this university joined Kamailio's development team, confirming that ghd project is offering a flexible framework that can meet demands from industry as well as research and academic world. The SCA module implements Shared Call Appearances, as defined in Broadworks SIP Access Side Extensions Interface Specifications.

Friends of Kamailio:

• James Body - in a category where awarded people are selected based on long term activity (not only based on what happened last year) and limited to two winners per edition, we are still at those supporting us from early 2000. James is one of them, being around from SIP Express Router times. His advocating of the project convinced during our early years many VoIP providers to start with this project as the telephony routing engine.
• Randy Resnick - being the producer of the weekly VoIP Users Conference, I am sure most of the VoIP word owns at least a bit to Randy. It is our case as well, from SER to OpenSER and Kamailio, we had many chances to promote the project and highlight its benefits during the live sessions moderated by Randy.

As of Personal Facts related to the project, besides still a lot of coding, I continued to propagate the knowledge about Kamailio, with development workshops and administration trainings, run by Asipto.com.

Nowadays, the main challenge is to organize the Kamailio World Conference (in Berlin, by mid of April), which is turning into an excellent RTC - RCS gathering in Europe, presentations slots are almost filled up, bringing to the stage an exceptional group of speakers. Do consider attending if you want to get the pulse of what is happening in the communications world and network with professionals in this area of expertise. See more details at:

• http://conference.kamailio.com

This is it for 2012. If you want to check the previous turn of awards, visit:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.de/2012/02/kamailio-2011-awards.html

Kamailio 2011 Awards

End of winter, therefore it's now time for the 5th edition of Kamailio Project Awards, granted for the activity during 2011, like in the past, each category has two winners.

First, I want to thank to everyone contributing to and using Kamailio/SER during 2011, their effort made possible to release a new major version with tons of new features - see release notes for v3.2.0.

The unconventional winners of 2011 are:

• the project itself - it succeeded to survive over 10 years since it started. There were many critical moments in the past (forks, renames and such), but it went through, becoming even stronger now, with an exceptional support from an amazing community.
• the development team - it succeeded to get on board lot of new contributors. This made it very hard to select the winners for Developer Remarks awards. According to Ohloh statistics, there were over 30 registered developers contributing code during the past 12 months.

The new category this year is Friends of Kamailio, for persons that helped for many years in various occasions, in background or foreground, and were always promoting and saying good stories about the project.

Next are presented the categories and the winners.

 Blogging:

• CSDN - the "Chinese Software Developer Network" - for spreading out news and tutorials about Kamailio, our Asian user base grew substantially lately.
• Jason Penton and Richard Good (the two being colleagues, were tied together here) - for many useful posts of how to deal with Kamailio on Solaris. The two are contributing code to the IMS extensions in our project.

Related Projects:

• Gemeinschaft - a project that aims to provide a secure, scalable and easy to use open source PBX platform built with Kamailio and FreeSWITCH, developed by Amooma and sponsored by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).
• Homer - SIP Capturing Server started by Alexandr Dubovikov, developed first time for Kamailio SIP Server project and adopted by other VoIP applications. In one side, Kamailio can be configured to mirror the SIP traffic, on the other side Kamailio can receive the mirrored traffic and save it to database from where it can be searched for various keywords via a web interface. Then, it can build diagrams from results or the results can exported in pcap format.

Technical Support:

• Jon Bonilla - for setting up the Debian/Ubuntu APT repositories, updating the .deb specs and maintaining them. It made the spreading through packages and installation lot more easier for these distributions.
• Laura Testi - for substantial feedback, testing and many patches on our SIP SIMPLE Presence extensions. I I would award development topics, SIMPLE Presence extensions would have been among the top ones in 2011 (user presence, dialog states (aka blinking lamps), resource list services, embedded XCAP server, SIP-XMPP presence gateway). Laura helped a lot to improve and develop further these components.

 New Contributions:

• dmq - Distributed Message Queue on top of SIP - the module presents huge potential and building a native distributed platform with Kamailio, personally I expect several modules to use it soon as underneath layer for data exchange between SIP server nodes. The developer is Marius-Ovidiu Bucur.
• json - JSON Parser and JSONRPC Client - json format has become very popular, being able to interact directly from the config file, opens the way to integrate easier with backend structures used for Web 2.0 services. As a plus, JSONRPC client uses the asynchronous processing framework added starting with v3.0.0. The developer is Matthew Williams.

Developer Remarks:

• Peter Dunkley - he and Crocodile RCS team contributed major enhancements to SIP SIMPLE Presence extensions towards RCS/RCSe (e.g., user presence services, resource lists services, embedded xcap server), as well as scalability. For a fair acknowledgement of contributed work, I am mentioning also his colleagues Paul Pankhurst, Hugh Waite and Andrew Miler.
• Timo Terras - by contributing SQLite database connector, running Kamailio on embedded systems entered in a new era. The primary choice in the past as DB backed for embedded devices was dbtext module, but it has limitations dealing with large records. With SQLite, any module can be fully functional on very small devices, from user authentication and authorization, sqlops, to location and presence services.

Advocating:

• Carsten Bock - for participating at, organizing and sponsoring several events related to Kamailio SIP server as well as publishing blogs and news about the project.
• Henning Westerholt - another year with Henning on traveling to most of our public events, speaking about the over 3 000 000 VoIP users platform he is involved in, with special credits for taking care of our LinuxTag 2011 presence, booth and slides.

VoIP Services:

• Portugal Academic Network - for running a large grid of Kamailio and Asterisk servers (about 500) to provide communication services. Credits to Ruben Sousa (at Astricon 2010) and Olle E. Johansson (at 10 Years SER event - the slides from previous link) for sharing their experiences in deploying this VoIP network with us.
• Telio - one of the oldest companies with development contributions to SER/Kamailio project, Telio continued to have in 2011 good revenue growth. I am adding also a special remark for its movement towards mobile networks, with launch of Goji application.

Business Initiatives:

• Crocodile RCS - one of the few players in the vendors market with a clear target for Rich Communication Services, their team was very active in the development process of Kamailio during last year. Mobile operators are in a rush to roll out value added services, especially in the social networking area - real time instant messaging and presence are going to play a crucial role for operators in their battle with the big Internet companies.
• Frafos - with a business oriented mainly to SIP Express Media Server (SEMS), the project started in the same place as SIP Express Route (SER), having many common developers, the company can help deploying addition components in Kamailio-based VoIP platform, to achieve functionalities such as media server (voice mail, conferencing, IVR), back to back user agents or session border controllers.

Events:

• 10 Years SER - the project crossed first time the age of 2 digits, a good opportunity to meet and look at the past, present and future. About 50 people spent a great day at FhG Fokus in Berlin, from first developers to our latest users. There were 15 presentations during the day and a relaxing grill party in the evening.
• LinuxTag - we were several time in a raw at LinuxTag with a booth for the project and presentations about it, but the last year we had the opportunity to meet in the same place 5 out of 11 members of the management team, pretty rare situation as we are distributed over many countries.

Academic Environment:

• Columbia University - for using our SIP server to conduct various research projects since 2002, results from some of them being useful and relevant for development and scalability of SER/Kamailio platforms. The Green VoIP paper showing interest results, like ability to cope with about 43 000 active TLS connections on a server with 2GB memory allocated for the SIP server. Worth to mention that Jan Janak, one of the major contributors to the SIP server, has been involved in some of the research projects.
• FhG Fokus Research Institute - for being a host of 10 Years SER event, but overall for starting in 2001 and funding the development of our SIP server project for many years. Also, during the recent past years, Fokus hosted several developer meetings. Another relevant contribution to the VoIP environment coming from Fokus is the OpenIMSCore project, developed on top of SER/Kamailio, several components from it being integrated in our project.

Friends of Kamailio:

• Olivier Taylor - for helping to organizes our meetings in Brussels, at Fosdem events. By now, for the last several years in a raw, Olivier did his best to select nice places to meet and enjoy great time with folks around Kamailio project and VoIP arena.
• Suzanne Bowen - an exceptional friend of open source telephony applications, Suzanne was ready to help always with written interviews and podcasts, free invitations to conferences and exhibitions, setting up connections, recommendations and discussions to various business entities, to reveal in the best way the benefits and strong points of Kamailio.

As of Personal Facts related to the project, I continued to release complete tutorials of using Kamailio, very useful and actual would be Bridging IPv4-IPv6 VoIP Networks, Secure Communications with Kamailio (building own Skype service alternative) - see all of them at:

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

This is it for 2011. If you want to check the previous turn of awards, visit:

• http://by-miconda.blogspot.com/2011/02/kamailio-2010-awards.html

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

Kamailio (OpenSER) 2009 Awards

The third edition covers a really special year: 2009. First of all, the big winner is the Kamailio project itself, being awarded Bossie'09 - Best of Open Source Networking Software by InfoWorld magazine, confirming its leadership in open source SIP server applications.

Then 2009 represents the year of completing Kamailio (OpenSER) and SIP Express Router (SER) integration under http://sip-router.org project, resulting in version 3.0.0 as first release based on this work.

As usually, the categories got two winners, listed in alphabetic order.

Blogging:

• Elio Rojano – Spanish blog focused on Asterisk and VoIP world, reflecting the important news about Kamailio (OpenSER) project. Web link: http://www.sinologic.net/blog/
• Jesus Rodriguez – again, very good covering of Kamailio (OpenSER) and SIP Router evolution in the Spanish community, with additional thanks for sponsoring the kamailio.org server. Web link: http://www.jerocu.net/wordpress/

Related Projects:

• SERCMD - command line interface for Kamailio (OpenSER) allowing to interact in real time via RPC commands with runing SIP server instances, developed by Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul. It is included in the source code and distributed with Kamailio (OpenSER) 3.0.0. Web link: http://sip-router.org
• SIREMIS – web management interface for Kamailio (OpenSER), project lead by Elena-Ramona Modroiu, offering web tools to manage data needed by most of existing modules and interact with running SIP server instances. Web link: http://siremis.asipto.com

Technical Support:

• Andrei Pelinescu-Onciul - the one that started SIP Express Router (SER) project offered limitless support during integration period of SIP Router project
• Jan Janak - one of the main developers of SIP Express Router (SER) project, as well offering limitless support during integration period of SIP Router project

New Contributions:

• memcached - connector to Memcache daemon, allowing interaction from configuration file to get/set items to the distributed caching system. Web link: http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/3.0.x/modules_k/memcached.html
• topoh - topology hiding, helping to protect the details about infrastructure, transparent to configuration file, without the complexity of back-to-back user agent or dialog state aware SIP server. Web link: http://kamailio.org/docs/modules/3.0.x/modules/topoh.html

Developer Remarks:

• Marius Zbihlei - for the work on optimizing the performance for different components
• Miklos Tirpak - for the work on asynchronous SIP message processing

Advocating:

• Alex Balashov - endless efforts on mailing lists, web forums and presence in USA to promote the project, offering consultancy services at Evariste Systems
• Inaki Baz Castillo - developed a set of additional tools for usage with Kamailio (OpenSER), published at http://dev.sipdoc.net. He dedicated time to talk about the project at Spanish events, help with mailing list and sort out leaks in SIP presence specifications.

VoIP Services:

• 1&1 - again present here since 2009 represented the merging of Freenet service into 1&1, resulting in over 4 000 000 phones managed by a Kamailio (OpenSER) based VoIP platform, routing over 2 billions of minutes per month. Web link: http://www.1und1.de
• sipgate - service revamped, with new site and many attractive features, among the biggest VoIP services world wide, with presence in Germany, UK and Austria. Web link: http://www.sipgate.de

Business Initiatives:

• Avanzada7 - organizing the Asterisk SIP Masterclass for Iberian market, training that includes a big chunk of scaling Asterisk using Kamailio SIP server, Avanzada7 offers a large range of services and products for VoIP businesses. Web link: http://www.avanzada7.com
• Quobis - employing a qualified team with broad expertise of SIP and Kamailio, company's main focus is building solutions using telecom emerging technologies like ITS, Smartgrids, Mobile WiMAX or open source VOIP. Web link: http://www.quobis.com/

Events:

• Amoocon - event organized on Rostock, Germany, succeeded to gather many VoIP projects. Web link: http://www.amoocon.org
• Fosdem - European biggest Free and Open Source Software developers meeting, in Brussels, Belgium (pictures). Web link: http://www.fosdem.org

Personal Business Facts:

• Kamailio SIP Router Masterclass - professional training for VoIP platform administrators. Attracted an amazing group of Telecom specialists to spend one week and learn the advanced capabilities of Kamailio for building scalable VoIP platforms. Web link: http://www.asipto.com/index.php/sip-router-masterclass/
• Telco grade SIP load balancer - a new appliance (official launch soon) designed to handle huge traffic, in a transparent manner for SIP end points and SIP application servers, taking care of high availability and traffic dispatching. Web link: http://www.asipto.com/index.php/sip-solutions/

If you want to learn more about latest stable version, Kamailio (OpenSER) 3.0.0, read here, here and here.

This is it for 2009. If you want to check the previous turn of awards:
http://by-miconda.blogspot.com/2009/01/kamailio-openser-2008-awards_19.html