Having just got back from TMC’s stupendous ITEXPO East show in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I must admit I harbor a bit a jealousy for Ari Zoldan from Launch 3 (http://www.launch3.net) a company that invests in communications companies worldwide. In a drawing at the very end of the show on a Friday afternoon, Zoldan, an unprepossessing fellow denizen of New Jersey (Garfield, to be precise) won a Toyota FJ Cruiser SUV. (Yours Truly is precluded from winning anything at an expo, of course, owing to my esteemed position as Executive Editor and all of the “sacred trust of journalism” trappings that go with it.)
They say that “winners never quit and quitters never win,” but, aside from everyone fervently pitching in and “winning one for the Gipper”, it helps when the luck of the draw is on your side, as in the case of Mr. Zoldan. I can recall one day when I was back in college, listening to a classical radio station in Philadelphia. The great stage and movie director Joshua Logan was being interviewed and was talking about his favorite classical pieces of music (which happened to include one of my favorite selections, the second movement in A minor from Beethoven’s Seventh). Logan suddenly stopped and remarked that “ambitious people say that they’ll make their luck, but don’t kid yourself, luck is real and you need it.” I suppose one could point to VHS tape “winning” over Sony’s Beta (alas, manufacture of VHS tape recently ended on the 30th anniversary of its first appearance) and other close calls in history. (Surely a case of “you win some, lose some”.)
But then, there’s SIP and its win over H.323. H.323 had a head start, appearing around 1996 as an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard and designed with a more traditional telecom mindset. SIP didn’t appear until 1999 but it was introduced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and so it immediately had more gravitas in the new-fangled packet-switched communications world. Both protocols allowed for voice and multimedia to travel via IP, but even though H.323 had quite a bit going for it, SIP (define - news -alert) turned out to be more scalable, less bloated and above all, was easier to work with than H.323 — of course, its detractors would say that’s because the original SIP specification couldn’t do much! However, over the years the SIP feature set has been extended, has gained tremendously in popularity, and so it has definitely “won its spurs” so to speak.
A major theme of this issue is SIP and IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem). SIP is a key component of IMS, which takes call control and interoperability to unprecedented levels and serves as a common service architecture to both wireless and wireline communications. IMS involves a major overhaul of much of the world’s telecom infrastructure, the cost of which worries many network operators. (I guess sometimes “you can’t win for the sake of losing”.)
This issue also contains articles on SIP development and testing tools. Interoperability is a major issue in the IMS world, and while every device gets along with every other device swimmingly in a perfect IMS network, the reality is that many devices and applications will have to go through several iterations before they can play together in the great IMS sandbox.
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