sipXecs aspires to become the most widespread open source solution

 A million lines of code, thousands of users and 4 years later sipXecs just became mainstream. “The solution long overshadowed by Asterisk” grew up and entered center stage cementing a giant leap forward towards the future of telephony.

It seems a big and radical move for a company like Nortel, but a very logical and business savvy one if you think about it. Open and interoperable solutions are the future of telephony and after having had a good look at all the contenders Nortel selected what they believe is the leading next generation technology available. And they chose us!

Reactions to the announcement came fast and furious, among them Tony Rybczynski of Nortel explaining some of Nortel’s rational, Digium’s surprisingly defensive reaction and subsequent face-off with Anthony Minessale of the FreeSWITCH project, followed by Rich Tehrani’s analysis. How much more fun can this be?

Since the public announcement of last week we, the Pingtel team, are continuously asked about the culture clash now going to work for a large company. And indeed a culture clash it has been but mostly for Nortel when, over a year ago, we started to get Nortel engineers introduced to the “open source way”.  And suddenly “everybody” wanted to be on the open team and contribute to sipXecs.

It’s all about ease-of-use. History repeats itself, but still we tend to forget. SIPfoundry and the sipXecs project have set out from the beginning to take open source telephony back to basics: ordinary users in ordinary companies. “Download and go” – no command lines, no complex configuration, and no proprietary or other specialized hardware.  Everyone should be able to install and use sipXecs without special training in all corners of our industry including flower shops, professional offices, companies with many branch offices, universities, enterprises with a mobile workforce, or large corporations. Scalability and redundancy included.

As unified communications and VoIP mature, it is over for geeks and geeky solutions that are capable but impossibly difficult to install and use. Feature richness at the expense of ease-of-use no longer works. And there is something else that changed: sipXecs no longer is an outsider trying to attack incumbent players and fight channel incumbency with open source. Instead, sipXecs just became part of the big league, incumbent in channels such as Nortel , Dell , IBM and HP in the form of Nortel’s commercial version, SCS500.

Everything I have seen at Nortel over the last year indicates that they are serious about open source. The sipXecs project already accelerated significantly thanks to Nortel’s contributions. The precedent has long been set of large corporations working closely with open source, just think about Google, IBM, HP, Sun, Novell and many more.

You should take our cooperation with FreeSWITCH as an articulation of strategy and future direction. It combines what we believe are the two most promising second generation telephony solutions as they both share one critical attribute: They work reliably thanks to good architecture, clean code, disciplined development, and thorough testing. The Wild West of "Silicotton Valley " is coming to an end.