Talking Mobicents with Ivelin Ivanov

The following is the contents of an [email] Q&A with Ivelin Ivanov, the founder and lead of the Mobicents open source project. Mobicents is a highly scalable event-driven application server that adds video, data, and voice convergence to the Java EE platform, read the FAQ for more information--

Q: Can you give us some background about yourself?

Here you go:
http://www.blogger.com/profile/668624

Q: How did you become involved with Mobicents?

Sometime in 2002 I noticed how mobile devices become powerful enough
to run custom applications that any developer can build. With
background in J2EE, I started thinking about the middleware that would
be needed to support future intelligent mobile devices. That is how
Mobicents was founded.

Q: Under which open source license is Mobicents distributed?

It is available under dual-licensing policy similar to that of MySQL
and Asterisk. The default open source license is GPL (GNU General
Public License). Commercial licensing is also available upon request.

Q: Mobicents is JSLEE 1.0 certified, what is the JSLEE standard and what is the significance of being compliant with it? 

JSLEE is the landmark standard for high performance Event Driven
Architecture (EDA). It is a crucial component of VoIP Middleware,
where high volume, low latency signaling is required. Scalability and
high availability are a must at levels exceeding thousands of incoming
transactions per second, each completing within tens of milliseconds.
Being compliant with JSLEE ensures safe investment for application
developers, who can choose from a number of vendors. It also allows
for economies of scale because users and vendors work together to
extend the platform with more standard features that benefit everyone.

Q: What is the Mobicents Foundation?

It is an effort to accelerate the advancement of Mobicents by allowing
strategic partners to donate funds and development resources to the
project in exchange for access to the core team and the ability to
influence project roadmap.

Q: What are Service Delivery Platforms (SDP) and IP Multimedia
Sub-Systems (IMS)?

Here is a definition that I agree with. In fact I had a chance to influence:
http://ims-insider.blogspot.com/2005/11/how-ims-and-sdp-fits-within-wider.html

Q: What is Mobicents' value proposition within IMS and SDP?

Mobicents is an Open Source SDP. Here is an article that outlines its
fundamental values:
http://ims-insider.blogspot.com/2005/11/open-ims-could-linux-model-work.html

Some quotes from operators:
http://mobicents.sourceforge.net/quotes.html

Some other thoughts on the Mobicents value proposition as a JSLEE:
1. General market demand for converged services deployment platform

2. Growing popularity of JSLEE as a viable industry standard for SLEE.
Based on a track record of successful projects at top tier telecoms as
well as demonstrated portability of applications between JSLEE
implementations from different vendors.

3. Mobicents has been certified for JSLEE almost 12 months ago and it
has established a reputation of stable development environment. There
are a number of projects that have passed pilot stage and are about to
be launched in production trials this summer. The Open Source SLEE has
also been engaged in international, multi-vendor projects such as
TeleManagement Forum Catalyst ICON2 and EU Programme 6 OPUCE.

4. Fast paced development community. The project is approaching 400KLOC
and there have been over 20 man years invested between contributing
partners. The project forums are the 3rd most active on Java.net. New
modules are being added very aggressively mainly due to simultaneous
contributions. Most recent additional have been a new SIP servlet
resource adaptor, XMPP RA, Media/JMF RA and Diameter/AAA RA.

5. Sharing development cost is paying off. Partners are beginning to
realize the savings and increased productivity by sponsoring the core
team and actively participating in the development of the platform.
Each has been able to build internally a small elite team of JSLEE
experts, while freeing up the majority of their resources for custom
application development.

6. Documentation, best practices, and examples have been mushrooming
at a fast rate due to the open nature of the project. Everyone learns
from the mistakes of others and quickly advance together.

7. Research companies such as Gartner started serious coverage of
Event Driven Architectures. Mobicents has been added to Gartner's "Who
is who in middleware" book.
http://ivelinivanov.blogspot.com/2006/03/gartner-starts-serious-coverage-of.html

8. Accelerated standardization of JSLEE extensions. Major JSLEE
vendors have agreed to leverage the open source community to develop
new RA Types. This is a big boost for the larger JSLEE ecosystem.
http://ivelinivanov.blogspot.com/2006/03/gartner-starts-serious-coverage-of.html

Q: In what other areas is Mobicents applicable?

In addition to telecom, Mobicents is suitable for a variety of problem
domains demanding Event Driven Architecture (EDA) for high volume, low
latency signaling. Examples include financial trading, online gaming,
sensor network integration (RFID) and distributed control.

Q: Which vendors have made a commitment to contributing to Mobicents?

Vendors that have made contributions to Mobicents or plan to do so, include:
T-Mobile, Lucent Technologies, Open Cloud, Aepona, NEC Japan,
Motorola, Siemens, JayWay

Operators:
Vodafone, Portugal Telecom Innovacau, Telecom Italia, Telefonica
Spain, Volgograd GSM Russia

Q: What should we look for from Mobicents in the next 6 months to a year?

- Career grade 1.0 GA release is on the horizon

Next:
- Support for JSLEE 1.1
- More high availability features
- A number of improvements of existing resource adaptors and
  additional resource adaptors for Media, Federated Identity Management,
  Google Talk/Jingle, more SS7 protocols, Billing
- Production time Management and Monitoring tools
- Enhanced Service Creation and other development tools

Q: What notable open source efforts are related to Mobicents?

JBoss, NIST SIP and XMPP4J are among the most popular open source
efforts that are related to Mobicents, but the full list is a lot
longer.

Q: It seems as if Mobicents has drawn a great deal of interest from mobile operators abroad, what would you attribute this to?

See the values to operators listed above. In short, European and Asian
operators are very aggressive at implementing next generation services
and they need the lowest cost, high quality infrastructure to build
on. Participating in an open source standards based initiative fits
the bill.

 

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