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December 2008 | Volume 11/ Number 12
Open Source

Talking with Ken Osowski, Vice President, Marketing & Product Management, Pactolus

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Ken Osowski (News - Alert) is Vice President of Marketing & Product Management at Pactolus Communications Software Corporation. Ken helped develop the company’s business plan to support funding activities and market entry, now directs its product strategy and marketing activities, and has helped Pactolus become one of the industry’s most widely-deployed, flexible and customizable service delivery platforms. Previously Osowski directed Boston Technology’s introduction and commercialization of its carrier-focused voice messaging platform, and subsequently defined IPeria’s market entry strategy as its Vice President of Marketing & Business Development. He holds a B (News - Alert).S. in Physics from Franklin & Marshall College and an M.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Processing 3-4 billion Minutes-of-Use (MOU) monthly in 140+ service provider NGN networks worldwide, Pactolus is a major player in the service provider hosted SIP/IMS-based applications domain. The customizable turnkey services provided by the company include residential/business Class 5 VoIP, large operator-assisted event and reservation-less audio conferencing, prepaid/post paid services and voice messaging.

Richard “Zippy” Grigonis recently caught up with Ken Osowski and interviewed him.




RG: Pactolus won a “Best of Show Award” from TMC (News - Alert) for its SIPdev.org Developer Community’s open source framework/open access Service Creation Environment (SCE). SIPdev is designed to be an easy-to-use platform for creating a new generation of highly-scaled services. What led you guys into open source? Can one make real money in this field?

KO: Absolutely, companies like ours can profit from open services — through service, support, integration, and session licensing. In our case, we have open-sourced the applications and frameworks, and we generate revenue for the underlying platform software. This lets us simplify and cost-reduce service creation for service providers and for independent developer/integrators, and license the run-time sessions so that we derive revenues when the service provider does, as usage grows.

Other open source models take a hardware approach by locking the developer and service provider into buying proprietary appliances, another approach to deriving revenue. With Pactolus, there’s a well-defined line between the SDP and the applications themselves, thus providing a clear line of demark between the two code bases. An SCE generates the applications that run on the platform.

This separation of application from the software platform makes it much easier for developers to build applications without worrying about scalability and reliability issues. By the way, this distinct delineation between the application and the platform is also key to another Pactolus differentiation — easily supporting the creation of any service that the developer can envision, not just IP PBX (News - Alert).

RG: Is it more difficult to manage open source development? Or is the product lifecycle accelerated?

KO: It’s not difficult for third-party developers or service providers to create and manage an open source-created service application, providing that there’s a solid code base that protects the developer and customer in terms of service scale, breadth and features, rather than one that prevents them from implementing scale and features. Case in point: we’ve seen Pactolus-based service applications built in less than 24 hours. The resulting service continues to scale as needed, and is generating profits for one of the world’s biggest IP carriers today – well over a year later.

RG: Is there more open source work in Pactolus’ future?

KO: SIPdev continues to grow, and there’s definitely new ways to integrate to our rich API set and applications. More and more enterprises and service providers are seeing the value in creating unique and highly usable, scalable services, and they are impressed with just how easily competitors have done so using SIPdev.org. Applications will be created having innovation and feature richness limited only by the developer’s imagination. Stay tuned – we’re creating device integrations and services that are optimized for arguably the industry’s most exciting platform. IT

Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

 

Open Source News

www.tmcnet.com/2573.1
Sangoma Reports 60 Percent Net Income Growth for Fiscal ‘08
Officials at Markham, Ontario-based Sangoma Technologies (News - Alert) Corporation say sales of $12.3 million fueled a net income increase of $2.9 million for the 12-month period that ended June 30.

According to the company’s president and chief executive officer, David Mandelstam (News - Alert), Sangoma saw eight consecutive quarters of record growth. “The challenge for the coming quarters is to meet and exceed past performance in a deteriorating economic climate,” Mandelstam said.

In the last fiscal year, Sangoma met and exceeded goals, according to figures the company released earlier this month. Sales in fiscal year 2008 of $12.3 million marked a 50 percent rise from the prior year’s tally of $8.2 million. The company also saw its net earnings per share rise 54 percent, from 7 cents to 10 cents, over the same period. The company set all-time records in sales and net earnings, and also finished the financial year with working capital of about $9 million, compared to $5.3 million in the prior year, an increase of 69 percent.
www.sangoma.com

 


www.tmcnet.com/2574.1
Salmat SalesForce Selects NetBorder to Optimize Contact Center Outbound Calling
Salmat SalesForce has selected the NetBorder software solution from Paraxip Technologies. A Sangoma company, Paraxip’s flagship software solution was chosen to help bolster the productivity of Salmat SalesForce’s contact center service. Salmat SalesForce offers a service based on agents conducting telemarketing campaigns, and calling back customers, making call progress analysis (CPA) a key contact center functionality to automate outbound calling.

Call progress algorithms classify whether an outbound call is answered by a person, voicemail, fax or other device. If it is a person, the call is routed to an agent. Such technology is essential in an outbound contact center environment as it enables higher productivity and helps to eliminate unnecessary calls.
www.salmat.com.au
www.paraxip.com

 


www.tmcnet.com/2575.1
Squiz Intros Open Source Social Networking Platform Software
Squiz, an enterprise-class open source CMS MySource Matrix developers has announced its Open Source Social Networking Platform Module. The Platform is designed to help create and run a social networking community through a Matrix installation, or by operating as a standalone implementation alongside a non-Matrix infrastructure.

The product integrates core Matrix module functionality such as tagging, related listings, RSS feeds, asset management, user profiles, search, front-end editing, and more, to deliver social networking environment. Since it is based on the Matrix platform, it can scale to thousands of users overnight. Matrix system assets are used, including: design templates from a public Web site; user profiles from an intranet or subscriber zone; and content assets like video and PDFs.
www.squiz.net

 


www.tmcnet.com/2576.1
Digium (News - Alert)’s AsteriskNOW 1.5 Available Now
Digium announced the release of the latest version of its AsteriskNOW software appliance. AsteriskNOW 1.5, which is available for download immediately. The new release incorporates the FreePBX graphical user interface (GUI), and is designed to significantly simplify the process of installing, operating and managing an Asterisk (News - Alert)-based telephony system, In addition to the FreePBX Web-based Asterisk management interface, the new release also includes an array of other open source components. AsteriskNOW 1.5 installs in 15 to 30 minutes and requires no in-depth knowledge of telephony or Linux to get started. By including the FreePBX administrative interface, Digium has made AsteriskNOW easier to configure and maintain.

The release also heralds a change in the delivery method, leveraging the freely available CentOS Linux distribution. The addition of FreePBX and the move to CentOS give open source telephony users a familiar, stable, community-driven platform for application development.
www.asterisknow.org

 


www.tmcnet.com/2577.1
Open Kernel Labs Releases New Embedded Hypervisor and Kernel
Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), a global provider of systems software and virtualization technology for embedded systems, has announced a new embedded hypervisor OKL 3.0 and a system software platform OKL 4 Nano. OKL 3.0 features two compatible configurations and suits a wide range of product portfolio of mobile device manufacturers. The hypervisor increases uniformity of the software architecture and encourages increased software reuse.The solution nis designed to help reduce cost and time to market.

The new OKL4 native applications are OS agnostic with respect to application stacks and therefore are reusable alongside Linux in one device and Symbian (News - Alert) in another. The full configuration of OKL 3.0 adds support for flexible security policies, resource allocation, and virtualization. The Secure HyperCell technology of OKL4 3.0 combines virtualization support without requiring a separate real-time operating system (RTOS). Secure HyperCell is delivered as small software units to meet resource usage, security and performance requirements of mobile devices.
www.ok-labs.com

 


www.tmcnet.com/2578.1
Good OS Plans Expansion of gOS to Support Intel (News - Alert) Atom-based Netbooks
Good OS, an operating system development company, is expanding its gOS Linux operating system for netbooks (ultra-portable computers designed for Web surfing and e-mail) and nettops (low-cost desktop computers). A version of the OS that supports Intel Atom processor-based netbooks and nettops, part of the Moblin open source project, will be released later this year.

Moblin, according to Moblin.org, is a Linux-based software platform used for building visually rich, dynamic and connected applications for devices based on Intel Atom processor technology. Moblin’s common core allows application portability for running on mobile Internet devices (MIDs), netbooks, and nettops.

The open source gOS platform will help original equipment manufacturers offer these types of lightweight computers at competitive prices.
www.thinkgos.com
www.tmoblin.org

 

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