Sounds like a recent rumor I heard from a close source a while back was true. Mark Spencer, founder and creator of Asterisk and CEO of Digium is moving aside to become the CTO according to Jeremy McNamara’s blog post. That’s not at all surprising given their recent investment from Matrix Partners. The rumor was the past several months have been painful as David Skok was urging him to bring in some top talent to turn the open source project into a real business. Given David’s recent involvement in the acquisition of JBoss by RedHat, I’m sure he’s following a specific game plan. However, Mark was fighting this and a number of top JBoss executives and key developers have been rumored to interview with Mark – with no success and all being left with the feeling of “amateur hour” – and an ego much worse than the famous Marc Fleury. And that’s pretty bad.

The technology of Asterisk has a lot of potential and is shaking up the telecommunications space. However, in my opinion and based on experience, it’s currently a big blob of crap and needs a lot of professional development help. Unlike JBoss, Asterisk is truely a hack. JBoss, like any open source project that has many developers working on it, also has its own set of issues – but I must say that for all the core people that have and continue to work on open source: they are professional and very good developers and architects. JBoss has a discipline for working hard to make it work with high quality. You might disagree with their approach, their implementation or even their cause – but if you understand the product and code well enough as I do, you have to agree it’s top notch.

Dig through the Asterisk code base. Oh my. Not only is it completely unmanageable and unreadable (partly because it’s put together using archaic C programming language) – it’s also wraught with memory leaks, crashes and just completely hacked out logic and patches. I’m sure they’re working hard to turn it into a real professional open source product, but they have a long way to go.

And what’s up with the new CEO – Danny Windham – from Adtran? OK, I get the parallels to the Digium board business, but c’mon. Adtran, the manufacturer of network access products like CSUs and Muxes? I’m not sure Adtran even knows what SIP is these days, nevertheless open source. Don’t get me wrong, they make decent products for that sector. But I guess David couldn’t find anybody good enough to go to Alabama to build an open source company. Hopefully, though, Danny will bring some level of professionalism and business to the Asterisk project and turn it into a real product. I think that would be good for everyone.
technorati tags: asterisk, digium, adtran, markspencer, sip, opensource

I got notified today by the RFC Editor of the IETF that one of the specifications I co-authored with Dave Burke of Voxpilot, Mark Scott of Genesys Labs, RJ Auburn of Voxeo and Scott McGlashan of HP last year has been published as an informational draft and now available.  The draft is called draft-burke-vxml-02.txt.
In the specification, we described a standard mechanism for a SIP interface to VoiceXML media services, which is commonly employed between application servers and media servers offering VoiceXML processing capabilities. Many of the modern VoiceXML browsers support a SIP interface – however, at the time, each of them had a different way to address them, how they dealt with media and how data was passed back and forth. In this specification, we tried to lay out a standard way that all VoiceXML Browsers supporting SIP should implement.

I’m not as active in the VoiceXML or W3C community as I have been in the past 5 years – however, I recently began a very interested project for a call center doing an Ajax, Web 2.0 enabled Agent Desktop and using VoiceXML and CCXML for the backend. We’re using the Voxeo software to build the application. It’s been fun getting back involved with these types of capabilities – but what is most interesting is the merging of modern web capabilities with next generation telecom and IVR to build a next generation call center application. This makes Asterisk look like a play toy. We’re using our new open source framework, called Seam(less), to rapidly built the application and integrate it into the Voxeo CCXML platform in a very unique way. I’m hoping that we’ll have the opportunity to open source some of the messaging we’ve built from the Seam(less) message broker to the Voxeo CCXML Event I/O interface. It’s truly a very interesting and powerful integration.

technorati tags: ietf, sip, call, control, ccxml, vxml, voicexml, voxeo, hp, genesys, voxpilot, seamless, asterisk, voip

If you have not already heard, today ZiVva annouced the acquisition of Vocalocity. You can read the press release to get a little more information.

This does mark the end to my involvement with Vocalocity. It is a very bitter sweet ending. I would like to thank Jim White of Sutter Hill Ventures, Mike von Grey of Revenue Med, Kelly Conway of eLoyalty, Sig Mosely of Imlay Investments, Said Mohammadioun, Lou Santora and all the other close advisors of the company, employees and investors – and most of all, I would like to thank Mike Dickerson, my partner and loyal friend for 5 tough and rewarding years at Vocalocity. I will forever be indebted to you and all the people that made Vocalocity a success.

At Vocalocity, we had the concept of taking complex and ever changing communications standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP, to name a few, and making software that completely followed the standard and that was available on an OEM basis to larger customers. To name a few: Microsoft, IBM, Aspect and Siemens. We also strongly believed that standards in the communications world would completely disrupt their proprietary cousins, over time. Time being the operative word. Standards have taken over, but at at rate that is hard to track. SIP has become so mainstream that some of the largest carriers in the world are using it natively. VoiceXML has completely taken over the IVR and next generation interactive voice application space. MRCP is now the de-facto specification for interfacing with a speech server.

However, standards also have competition – not just from big companies like Microsoft who sometimes choose not to follow them (or better, extend and embrace them). For example, Skype is the world’s largest VoIP network – and they don’t use SIP – at least not natively. And you can’t say that’s because they have a legacy application problem – they’re somewhat a new company dispite their size.

Some of the frustration that I always felt as part of my involvement in the standards process is that they move too slow. Slow on purpose, I understand. But sometimes, too slow for any good. Technology is evolving at a breakneck pace – and standards need to evolve on a more practical timeframe, not a timeframe that is suitable for a large research organization. The IETF is quite dramatically different than the W3C in this regard. While the W3C moves like a glacier, the IETF moves like a startup. IETF drafts expire every 6 months, forcing momentum. But causing lots of drafts that sometimes have not much change. On the other hand, how many different SIP extension drafts exist? A lot and that causes some fragmentation.

I don’t claim to have any answers or even plausible suggestions – even after 4 years of standards work. But, it needs to be examined.

To all the former employees of Vocalocity, you’ll always be near and dear to my heart for your hard work, dedication and friendship. I wish everyone the best of luck in the future and hope we can work together again. Please keep in touch.

Technorati Tags: vocalocity, zivva, voicexml, ccxml, sip, ietf, w3c, mrcp

The JBoss guys have released a pretty nice new product, (well, at least it’s a new name), called the JBoss Collaboration Server.

What would really be nice would be to add Voice features to the collaboration suite, something that both Microsoft and Siemens have done to their respective competitive products. This would provide a nice alternative to Asterisk, one which could be based on a Java specification (JSR-116 or the new upcoming JSR-289), and one which would be based on standards such as VoiceXML, CCXML and MRCP.

But, then again, that would require JBoss to enter the telecom space I suppose and that might be challenging for them as Ken Lee’s pointed out in his blog about JBoss-based HotSip. JBoss only has one real telecom evangelist, Ivelin Ivanov. But Ivelin’s Mobicents has almost no play inside of the JBoss mind-meld it seems on the surface — to no fault of Ivelin’s I would suspect.

Maybe JBoss+RedHat should buy Asterisk? That would combine two large open source communities – sure – but would be somewhat of a technical disaster. The Asterisk codebase is horrible and pretty unstable. It’s also C (not even fully C++) and would be difficult to merge into the JBoss codebase, which of course is Java, and fairly next generation.

Technorati Tags: jboss, sip, voip, redhat, asterisk, java

Using state charts or modeling tools like UML aren’t really anything new – part of developing a VoiceXML, CCXML or SIP application these days is about managing and coordinate states. It’s not always fun, can be largely redundant and causes wicked, hard to find bugs in application development.

The W3C Voice Browser Working Group is working on a new programming language called State Machine Notation for Control Abstraction (SCXML) which is modeled after Harel State Charts. Jim Barnett of Aspect Software is the lead Editor and an extremely bright individual.

Lots of the core language of the VoiceXML FIA and the CCXML EHIA is largely driven by state. CCXML itself is really a state machine application. The VoiceXML application you typically would author is really no more than a finite state machine, at least at this point in the evolution of modern dialog systems. So, why SCXML and how is it affecting VXML and CCXML? SCXML is an attempt to refactor part of the common capabilities and requirements of the language into another language that is common and specific to this cause. A good reason to refactor. Also, VoiceXML 3.0 will have additional requirements and having an ability to mix CCXML and VoiceXML applications using a unified state representation allows better applications, more modular applications and applications which can focus on the domain rather than the form.

Enter a new (yet old) player in the area: AT&T and Call Advantage. They have years of experience working in the real world building a very complex SIP based system which is not your grandfather’s phone system. They have recently introduced the results of their research in a new project called echarts. What’s interesting here is that there is a lot to learn from their experience building highly state driven, very dynamic features in SIP. There system has allowed them to layer sophisticated feature interaction and do it in a way which scales in a large environment with many subscribers.

We should look at how we can leverage their work as part of SCXML.