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.