Here is what happens when someone has a birthday, specifically someone from Digium, during AstriDevCon:

Brent has a birthday during AstriDevCon 2010

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For those who had been reading this blog for some time now, you may have stumbled across my blog post from 2008, regarding me buying a Nokia E90 - http://www.simionovich.com/2008/06/06/i-finally-purchased-a-nokia-e90.

Well, it’s a fact, since the year 1998, I’ve been an avid Nokia fan. I think I’ve ranged from the old Nokia 51XX, through the 6XXX up to the E61, E62 and E90 – if it was some funky Nokia phone that gave me some new feature, I most probably had it. I guess that the time I spent at m-Wise, working closely with various mobile content technologies had put its toll on me – and I became a Nokia Cell Phone addict. For many years I couldn’t imagine myself digressing from the Nokia clan. Even when my friends moved from their Nokia/Motorola/Ericsson phones to a star spangled iPhone – I remained faithful to my old habits – and remained with my trusty Nokia.

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About two years ago I promised myself this: “If you ever decide to move to a touch screen phone, don’t go ala iPhone, stay for a Nokia phone” – so I waited. The initial Nokia touch phones came out. The first Nokia touch phone that came out, I believe shortly after the iPhone was the Nokia 5800, also known as the Nokia XpressMusic.

I’ve got one thing to say about this phone – “What the hell were you thinking???” – it’s a phone, not a bloody MP3 player – if I wanted an MP3 player, I would have bought an iPod. Apart from being the slowest phones I’ve ever encountered, its touch interface was annoying and disruptive.

So, I didn’t buy the Nokia 5800 – I simply had no use for it. At that point I decided to wait a bit more, and see what Nokia cooks up. Shortly after seeing the 5800 in dis-action, I met a new member of the Nokia clan: the Nokia 700.

The Nokia 700 was a totally new thing, not really a phone, not really a PDA – somewhat of a cross between the two. It was big and bulky, and I couldn’t imagine myself walking around with one of these – however, it showed some promise. Sure, it was big, bulky, slow and anything bad you can say about a device – however, it had one thing – it showed potential – something to look for. At that time, I decided that I needed a proper smart phone and purchased the Nokia E90 – and I was fairly happy with it till 8 months ago.

You are probably asking, why would an avid Nokia fan become displeased with his trusty E90 phone – the answer is simple – the plastics. The plastics are of such low quality, that after 18 months of usage, the paint job starts to peel away from the phone. As you run more and more applications, or store more data, the phone becomes sluggish and slow – to the point where you have to reset it.

So, 2 months ago I gave up, I said to myself: “that’s it, time to move forward and leave the Nokia clan” – but I still didn’t want to put myself with the iPhone clan – or to be more exact, the iPhone cult movement. While at the Amoocon convention, I came across some people who were using HTC phones, specifically the HTC Evo. Well, I was somewhat taken with this snazy piece of hardware. It was fast, it was fluid and for some funky reason, I felt at home with it. Could it be, have I found a new clan for my mobile needs? I returned back home starting to examine my options. The HTC Evo isn’t available in Israel, the next best thing is the HTC Desire.

The HTC Desire is also known as the Google Nexus-1, basically it’s the same phone. I tried using the Nexus-1, but I didn’t like it. Specifically, I didn’t like the fact that the four keys are touch based – on the HTC these are real keys, making my life much easier.

So now, I’m equipped with the HTC Desire, and apart from the occasional Android crash (not too often to be honest) – it is one of the best phones I ever had. It’s fast, syncs my life into a manageable construct and most importantly, it’s become a second nature to me. The only disadvantage of owning such a phone is that you need a massive Data plan with your carrier – this little machine can gobble up ten’s of megabytes on a daily basis. My old Nokia E90 was using 25MB of data per month, with the Desire, I consume that much in less than a day – that is an amazing number.

In order to get better into Android development, I’ve ordered an Eken M002 device. This is a 7″, Android based tablet PC. I’ll be posting information about that once it arrives.

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When I started using Open Source software, it seemed like all Open Source projects are driven by philanthropic agendas. We were all focused on “sticking it to the man” – showing all these would be software vendors that community driven projects can do just as well – if not better.

"When I was a child I spoke as a child I
understood as a child I thought as a child;
but when I became a man I put away childish
things." - I Cor. xiii. 11.

Well, I’m not claiming that Open Source is childish – absolutely not, however, when you are a student you tend to look at things in one way, when you have a family to care for – you start looking at things differently. You remember these days in life when your dad said: “When you’ll have children you will understand” – well, now I do.

So, what am I rambling about exactly? I’ll tell you. The day before Passover I attended several meetings, which when I came back home had pissed me off immensely. I feel an urge to write all about these meetings, including who I met exactly, however – I won’t do that. However, I will give a rough idea of these.

Meeting 1 : A world recognized Mobile application player

I came into the meeting with this company, where the CTO of the company explained to me that they are looking to create an Asterisk based solution for their application’s users. My initial question was: how many users? what is your concurrency level? – The answer that I got was: “Oh, we don’t need something major, just a few lines of configurations in Asterisk config files in order to make this work”.

I left the meeting slightly pissed off, thinking to myself: “You bloody inconsiderate prick! You bring me to a meeting, spend my time – and then telling me that this is just a few lines of configuration. If it is that simple, why don’t you do it yourself? you have 20 developers in there, 4 IT people and god knows how many outsourced workers off-shore – if it was that simple, you would have done it already – so probably it isn’t – right?”

Meeting 2 : A well established IVR services vendor

The second meeting was with a well established IVR content vendor, this company runs around 16M minutes of inbound IVR traffic every month. They invited me in order to talk about expanding into new countries, wishing to get premium based access numbers in various countries. So, we started talking, and the guy indicates that he wants a certain kick-back payout, which I know is impossible – at least without charging the user more. Actually, the guy indicated that out of the interconnect fee, he wants to get almost 90% as a kick back.

Meeting 3 : A start up rendering IVR content

The third meeting was the most amazing one – these guys wanted to build an Asterisk system to server around 4000 concurrent channels – outsource the entire development to my company – and pay as a revenue share. When I asked for their business model, marketing plan, investors, profiles – I got a response of – we don’t yet have all of these, we only have an idea at this point that we want to implement.

Garage based companies are built by people who can do the work themselves, not the other way around.

At this point, you are probably asking yourself: “What does this have to do with the title?” – Well, all of these meetings had one thing in common. The people I met were under the impression that Open Source is some form of philanthropy. Or to be more exact, people who deal with the Open Source market are philanthropists. My question is this: “Why are we perceived as philanthropists? don’t we have families to care for? don’t we need to pay mortgages and bills just like everybody else?”. I guess when people read about the various Open Source entrepreneurs, such as Mark Shuttleworth – the immediately associate Open Source with Big Exists – this is not the case.

At some level, this is purely our fault – we educated people that Open Source is a highly economical methodology of solving technical challenges. No where along the way, had we educated the public that behind the model there are people, people who need to make a living.

If you are an Open Source consultant, developer, evangelist or just someone who may have an opinion on this, I’d love to read what you say.

Well, it’s been almost a month since I’ve started writing about the humbug project. Now, it’s time to actually get you people involved, at least in the initial levels. We are looking to add 10 additional members into the humbug call analytics suite. Currently available analytics during the alpha testing is inbound call analytics.

Our aim is to gather as much information as we can and as much user requests as we can, humbug is a community oriented project, thus it relies on community oriented input and feature requests. Participating members will  be granted access to the humbug analytics portal, allowing them to gather statistical information regarding their inbound call hits and their top ten DID numbers – we are working on additional statistics. As new stats will become available, we’ll role those out into the service as soon as possible.

In order to participate in the closed alpha testing, please send an email to alphatest at humbuglabs.org, and we’ll send you a short piece of dialplan code to insert into your Asterisk server. Technically speaking, we’ll send you a short AGI command that looks like this:

exten => _X.,n,AGI(agi://somehost/DataReceiver,some_unique_ident)

The above line needs to be inserted into any place you would like to generate call analytics from. We’ll also enclose configuration steps for FreePBX (and other FreePBX compatible distributions). We are hard at work for creating a FreePBX integrated module, so you can do a one-click install.

“Oh, just get me the CDR‘s and I’ll take it from there” – how many times have I heard these words before? I can’t even imagine the number of times in the past 15 years of IT/Telecom’s work that I’ve done and in the last 8 years of Asterisk in particular – when it comes to billing and fraud management, it would appear that the CDR’s are the Rosetta Stone of the industry.

Over the past 6 months, several of my friends and I had been asking ourselves this question: “Is there more to billing, fraud management and profit leakage? does it really all begins and ends with the CDRs?” – so, here we were, a group of 3 engineers dealing with telecom system and billing systems – we knew that the answer is a definite YES, however, how come most companies and system aren’t even aware of this, in such a way that causes them to leak telecom profits and waste their hard earned profit margins on simple accidental mis-interpretation of CDR records.

So, we’ve decided to sit down and start analyzing calls in real-time, trying to evaluate not only the CDR record that is received upon the completion of the call – but also understand the traversal path of the call, analyzing it in real time and evaluating it profit leakage potential. At the mean time, we’re concentrating our work on Asterisk, as it is the simplest for us to implement – however, we’re not focusing it only on that – we’ll looking at adding it to FreeSwitch, Yate, OpenSer/Kamailio, OpenSIPS and the various varients.

So, what have we done so far? well, one thing we never really had with any of the existing systems was a clear view of what’s going on “right-now” on our systems, so we said: “it would really be great if we could know how many call hits we’ve received during the past 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes” – so here is what we made:

The above image shows our top 10 inbound DID numbers, as you can see these are in the 972 and 447 country codes (yes, we work mainly in Israel and the UK). At the backend, our servers are analyzing the data in real time, generating an active alert in the case a DID number’s statistics change in a somewhat drastic change, thus, establish a traffic anomaly. Another thing that interested us was our usage across multiple servers, which we are exhibiting in the below graph:

Now, as you can see, the top graph shows a discrete anomaly:

This anomaly indicates something went wrong on all our servers between 00:45 and 1:15, which gives us a fairly discrete period of time to seek for a problem in the system. What happened was that one of the guys updated a portion of the data traversal API – basically deleting it [we resumed full work after about 40 minutes].

So, where is it all going to? well simple, a new Open Source based service that we’ll be launching within a few months from now. Our intention is to provide a means for simple, straight forward, highly reliable, call analytics, fraud management and profit leakage analysis service. A service which is based upon a simple to use API on one hand and Open Source based data gathering agents. Our belief is that by analyzing large amounts of data, from multiple sources around the world, we’ll be able to ascertain the fingerprint of a telecom bound attack – being able to alert the respective users of the service and maybe in the later future, also provide a means to block the attack as it advances across the world.

I’ll be updating about our advancement as we go along, but for the time being, this is something I felt would interest you.

Today I got the chance to speak at a Polycom half-day convention, mainly to speak about Asterisk and HDvoice. Now, putting aside the part about HDvoice (I’m getting a post about that on its own), I gotten to the point where I believe that I’m currently perceived as being an eccentric.

So, why am I eccentric? very simple, I’ve reached a point where I can say things that may be perceived as rude – and write it off an being an eccentric quirk.

I’ve talked about Asterisk ability to support Video, while the current Polycom VVX1500 video phone isn’t yet supported at its fullest. One of the people in the crowd mentioned some sleezy,al-cheapo, SIP Video phone (to be more exact, he’s the local distributor) – and I claimed that I don’t count that phone as a comparison to Polycom or other VoIP Video phones, simply because in my view it’s not a worth while comparison. Comm’on, let’s be realistic, can you compare a Polycom VVX1500 (an HDvoice Video phone) with some shitty sub-VGA SIP Video phone from China? the mere comparison is simply insulting for Polycom.

Shortly after negating that phone, the person stood up and left the room. At the break, a friend said to me that I shouldn’t have said that, in order to come out the bigger man. Common, the guy is surely making a joke of himself. I commented: “I’ve said what I said, I stand by my opinion – besides, you know I’m eccentric – eccentric people say eccentric things” – he agreed that I’m eccentric, after all, you can’t be an Open Source evangelist without being an eccentric – now can you?

Ok, it’s day 1 (or actually day 2) for AstriCon 2009 – and here’s my report for the day.

Yesterday was kind’a of a hectic day for me, as I was teaching a full day track of Asterisk and Cloud Computing, specifically, implementing Asterisk systems with Amazon EC2. I started the day with a class filled with 20+ people, and ended the day with a similar number – so in general I’m very happy. Not many people tend to attend the pre-conference days, so having that number of people and their positive reactions through out the day were very reassuring to me.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from this experience, it is the following: If you give a full day track, don’t arrive at the hotel 24 hours prior to it – you need at least 48 hours! People didn’t really notice (I hope), but through out the day I was suffering from a splitting headache – one that would usually send me right into bed with a couple of Advil’s. But hey, that didn’t stop me and I powered through it, I’m fairly proud of myself for doing so – as at the end of the day I regained back my strength and was livelier.

Today was the first official day of the conference – I gave the opening talk for the Cloud Computing track of the day. My talk was about how to build “IP Centrex” like services, without building an “IP Centrex”. I guess that I didn’t really introduce a brand new concept, but actually talked about something that many are thinking about, but are not inclined to try it on their own and burn some cash on. I guess my talk helped them out saying: “Hey, we’re not talking out of our asses here, this guy makes some sense and what we thought of isn’t that far fetched”.

Previous to that, Digium announced the 2009 Digium innovation award winners, where my company won an award in the pioneer category. This is the second year in a row my company had won the award, and I’m really happy with being acknowledged for this specific work. Having being a part of the community for over 7 years now, this award, at least to me personally, says a lot – it’s basically saying: “Look, you’ve done good, you’ve done some work that really helps out the project and the community in general – here’s a beer and a toast to you – hip hip” – well, that’s kind’a of a mouth full, but you get what I mean. I think that this is actually the place to mention that the award was for developing a high-powered Dialer/IVR platform, used in the Israeli elections and the work was contracted for a company called Shtrudel.

The all conference party is tonight – so I better rest up and be ready for it – should be fun. I guess beer and food are always a good mix when a bunch geeks are getting together

For those of you who know personally, you probably already know that last month I became a father. I guess the transition is something that I was more or less ready for, at least on the technical terms of the transition. However, the thing that completely surprised me was the mental transition – which isn’t even related to the somewhat lack of sleep here and there.

So, here I am, about a month and half away into the final touches to our new home, spending the weekend deploying over 100 meters of CAT-5 cabling in the house – yes the house is network rigged to the teeth. I’m sitting in my daughters room, clamping away the wall sockets for the network, thinking to myself: “hmmmm…. will Nitzan need a single network connection? or should I put at least two for future usage? … hmmmm…. well, I guess time would tell”. In any case, so there I was, spending most of my weekend being my own geeky self, thinking about wiring, networking, wireless exposures, access points, etc. I then go back home, and suddenly, all that disappears the minute I put Nitzan on my shoulder to burp her. It’s really funny, but with her on my shoulder, I guess everything goes away for a few minutes. My brother-in-law informed the house that he caught me burping Nitzan, while sitting at my computer answering emails with the other hand – Ok, so I can’t stop being a geek all together.

In any case, here I am juggling the various aspects of being a father to a new born baby, attending to the various tasks required to final touches of the house (painters, cleaners, air cons, dry walls, etc) and of course, attending to my customers – some of which are completely ambivalent to the fact that I’m under a constant lack of sleep in the past month. Well, I guess in a couple of months Nitzan will start sleeping better, and would make life easier for both me and my wife; in the mean while, we take comfort with the sleep periods my wife gets during the day, so that I can work and cater to my customers, while she caters to Nitzan during the nights – and I have to be honest about this, when it comes to the baby, my wife is the closest thing to a Jedi Knight, her ability to stay focused and clam even when the Nitzan is screaming is amazing – I can’t always do it.

Ok, enough about the house and Nitzan, let’s go back to been geeks for a bit. As you can see on the right hand side of the blog, I’ll be speaking at the up-coming Astricon. I’ll be giving a talk about how to build “IP-Centrex” like installations, utilizing Asterisk and tools like VMWARE, XEN and OpenVZ. However, while my talk may be interesting to you (I hope), my pre-conference tutorial will be much more interesting. I’ll be giving a full day tutorial, teaching people how to install Asterisk in a clouded environment (cloud computing), mainly the Amazon EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. For those of you reading this blog, you may have noticed that I’ve developed a distinct interest in the Amazon EC2 cloud, which I’ve written about several times and also lectured about at Amoocon. While my Amoocon presentation was mainly informational, at Astricon I’ll be primarily teaching you how to do what I did. Well, I won’t be teaching you the inner workings of the GreenfieldTech IVR API framework, although, if you’re gonna ask questions I will answer (especially if you ask the question 3 times, I can’t stand it when people ask the same question 3 times – I just have to answer it – nudge nudge).

Ok, back to fatherhood and Nitzan stuff. The mental transition that I was referring to before is something that I felt last night in its most force. My wife and I decided to go to one of the malls, not far away from our house. So, we entrusted Nitzan with my in-laws and drove to the mall. The mall I’m referring to is called “The seven stars mall” and we like it. It’s not a big mall, but its got this shop called DOMO, that carries these high class cooking ware (my wife and I really like to cook – my chilli con-carne is well known). So, here we were walking the mall, after I ordered a pair of shoes that I needed. So, my wife comments: “You know something, let’s see if there is some sale at Super-Pharm.” – and then we ended up purchasing baby formula, pacifiers and baby wipes. I then asked my wife if she maybe wants to walk into DOMO, but we both didn’t really think about it – suddenly, something that was like a default prior to Nitzan is no longer a default – interesting isn’t it?

In any case, this is how my life looks like at this point in time – and I have to admit that I kind’a like it. Sure, I don’t get as much sleep as I got before, but hey, I’m happy with it – so I just keep on smiling and go on forward.

Cellcom

Since early 2006, an ever increasing competition between the local PTT carriers in Israel, had introduced an unlikely friend to the Asterisk community in Israel. While Cellcom, one of Israel’s largest cellular carriers, isn’t closely associated with the PSTN market – it’s entrance to the local PTT market, especially into the E1 PRI market, had introduced the most unlikely friend to Asterisk.

Cellcom’s highly aggressive marketing techniques, rapid deployment of skillful sales agents and a highly motivating sales campaign – had yielded a migration of many customers from the local PTT carrier (Bezeq) utilizing Analog lines with traditional PBX systems, to low cost, PRI circuits provided by Cellcom, with low cost Asterisk based IP PBX systems.

Now, coming 2009, Cellcom had sprung up a new marketing campaign for their new service line: all-in-one Internet access and telephony service for your home. The service is rendered via the utilization of an OPTION GlobeSurfer II devices, allowing you to connect your home wireless network and an analog phone directly to the device.

OPTION GlobeSurfer II

So, why is Cellcom becoming a better Asterisk friend? very simple, the usage of the GlobeSurfer II device, in an SMB environment is the ideal companion for a small time Asterisk installation – in the office. Each GlobeSurfer devices allow us up to 2.4Mbps of downlink Internet with 384kbps of uplink – and a dedicated phone line. All of this, for a low cost of 29$ per month (give or take a few dollars). By all standards, that price is lower than any of the high-power uplink Broadband connections in Israel – thus, this is an ideal choice for a small office. Now, all that we need to facilitate an office of 4-6 people, is to have two of these units, get a router that can support multiple (2 or 3) Internet uplinks – walla – we have the perfect office communications suite. Another added value is that our office is now truely mobile – we want to move offices, no problem, takes 10 minutes to move the offices and start working again. Now, the only thing that’s missing from the mix is the availability of static IP addresses on the link, and you’ve got a serious potential looking at the new PTT killer in Israel – Wireless Internet and telephony to go – at a price you can afford.

Other questions that remain are:

1. Will Cellcom allow for a single mobile number/landline number to be associated with multiple SIM card gateways such as this, allowing for office redundancy and maybe in the future true IVR capabilities?
2. Will Cellcom allow its customers to aggregate more bandwidth in the future, allowing for true VoIP services to operate using these units?
3. While the units are fully capable of rendering up to 7.2Mbps downlink and 2.4 Mbps uplink, Cellcom is limiting these to 2.8 Mbps downlink and 384kbps uplink – will they increase that in the near future?

All things considered, I believe that this unit will make Cellcom into a new contender in the market, allowing for new residential services and competition to exist – in other words, the heat in the Israeli residential and SMB market in on – let’s get cooking.

I recently gave a presentation at the Amoocon convention, held in Rostock, Germany – about Asterisk and Amazon EC2. Below is a medium quality video of that presentation:

or you may download it here:
Amazon EC2 and Asterisk video files

As I recently explained to a good friend of mine, the essence of Jewish holidays is, more or less, the ever growing consumption of food – due to our great fortune with people trying to kill us and not being able to do so. Putting that aside, now a days, the essence of Jewish holidays, at least in Israel, is to basically sit at home and do nothing.

Last week was Passover. For those not in the know, Passover is the weird Jewish holiday when we’re not allowed to consume any bread or bread like products. On one hand, it reminds us our ancestors who travelled the desert for 40 years, and had to leave Egypt in a rush, so their bread didn’t rise. So, we eat Matza Bread to remember that time. However, today, you can make bread from a multitude of other ingredients, not only White Flour. For example, you can make bread from Potato Flour, Soy Flour or even Rice Flour – in other words, anything else by White Flour. I’m confident the orthodox Jew will claim that I’m wrong – but hey, that’s my 2c on the matter. In any case, Passover started on the 7th of April, and lasts 7 days. The first 2 days and the last 2 days are national holidays. So, the only work days that remained were: 9th, 12th, 13th. The 9th was a Thursday, no use working for one day, 12th was a Sunday, most of my customers abroad are not working, 13th was a Monday – hence – a single day of actual work to do. For a workaholic, like myself, that is more or less a nightmare.

VoIP Providers

Recently, a post on voip-info.org had caught my eye:

• 2009-04-15 - VoIP Providers Ranking AZ-VoIP-Providers publishes latest International Top 10 VoIP Providers Ranking on 15-April-2009.

I’ve decided to visit that website and take a look at the providers the “so-called” list offers. So, in general, the site is nothing more that a so-called “VoIP Link Farm”, promoting some services over others. In general, the site only contains some logos of service providers, a shit-load of Google banners, and some poor content relating to the actual pricing of the service providers – in other words, nothing new. So, if you’re looking for the real thing, stay away from this site, there is nothing special in there.

Digium Releases Fax for Asterisk

Per Digium’s website, the Digium Fax for Asterisk is:

Digium's Fax For Asterisk is a commercial facsimile (Fax) termination and origination
solution designed to enhance the capabilities of Open Source and commercial Asterisk
as well as Switchvox. Fax For Asterisk bundles a suite of user-friendly Asterisk
applications and a licensed version of the industry's leading fax modem software from
Commetrex. Fax For Asterisk provides low speed (14400bps) PSTN faxing via DAHDI-
compatible telephony boards as well as VoIP faxing to T.38-compatible SIP endpoints
and service providers. Licensed on a per-channel basis, Digium's Fax For Asterisk
provides a complete, cost-effective, commercial fax solution for Asterisk users.

Ok, Fax is one of the most anticipated parts that Asterisk had been in need, since the creation of Asterisk. While back in the days of SpanDSP and Hylafax you were able to go about and send/receive faxes, in a somewhat reliable manner (who am I kidding, it was only 80% reliable), Digium’s Fax for Asterisk is surely a new step-up. This new add-on shows that Digium is maturing, becoming increasingly serious about their approach to the Enterprise market. I’ve been working with the FREE Fax-For-Asterisk license, which provides a single license and I have to admit – it works fairly well (what am I talking about, currently, 100% of faxes pass through without a hitch!).

New blog – The GreenfieldTech Blog

Well, after working on my own, for a period of more or less 2 years time – I’ve finally expanded GreenfieldTech. GreenfieldTech now enjoys 2 distinct divisions: the telecom division and the web analytics division. To read more about it, you’re welcome to visit our new company blog at http://blog.greenfieldtech.net/

Udim, Israel. April 1, 2009 -GreenfieldTech Ltd., a leading provider of Asterisk solutions and Asterisk training services in Israel, today announced the availability of it’s patented app_cashmaker application for the Asterisk Open Source PBX system. The CashMaker application is intended to be used by various content suppliers, wishing to distribute Audio and Video based content, utilizing their Asterisk server.

The application is built to accept an inbound call into it, then, according to various information gathered in correlation to the callers caller ID and/or inbound DID number, will correlate a relevant content stream directly to the caller. The content distributor doesn’t even have to care about what content to distribute, as the application will connect directly, via the Internet, to a remotely available RTBSP streaming server at GreenfieldTech data center.

“The app_cashmaker application is the result of the cumulative work of over 3 years in the making, testing various content business models and applications. The main problems most content distributors have is how to gather the content and manage it, with app_cashmaker, this requirement is negated, thus allowing the distributor to concentrate on what they do best – flooding the newpapers with ads and marketing material to promote their content delivery service”, says Nir Simionovich, CEO and Founder of GreenfieldTech.

Simionovich indicated that the central content distribution facility is managed via a GTBS cluster environment, implemented partially utilizing Amazon’s EC2 and S3 structures, while utilizing GreenfieldTech’s proprietary streaming and clustering technologies. Currently, GreenfieldTech had submitted 10 different provisional patents, relating to the technologies comprising the app_cashmaker application and service. GreenfieldTech marketing team had indicated that initial beta trials had showed an increase in content availability, via the GreenfieldTech BSC Cloud facilityof over 40% with an increase of almost 80% in content delivery success.

Simionovich estimates that by the year 2010, over 20,000,000 will use the GreenfieldTech app_cashmaker facility, disrupting completely the way mobile, audio and video content is distributed around the world.

Asterisk is the world’s leading open source PBX telephony engine, and telephony applications solution. It offers unmatched flexibility in a world previously dominated by expensive proprietary communications systems. The Asterisk solution offers a rich and flexible voice infrastructure that integrates seamlessly with both traditional and advanced VoIP telephony systems. For more information on Asterisk visit http://www.asterisk.org 

For more information, please refer to the GreenfieldTech website at http://www.greenfieldtech.net.

Well, I guess it’s time for another Israeli Asterisk update post – one that was well due a long time now. This post was written after the recent hectic 3 weeks of Asterisk events and news here in Israel. So, I guess we’ll open with some news – beep, beep, beep.

Asterisk based Contact Centers

EasyRun, a world wide provider of Call Center and Contact Center solutions had announced the availability of its EpicAcce solution.

EasyRun Partners with Xorcom to Offer the Industry’s First Enterprise Grade PBX Agnostic Contact Center

EPICAcce Delivers the Industry’s First PBX Agnostic Enterprise Grade Contact Center Solution

For those in the know, the EpicAcce solution is based upon the Asterisk Open Source PBX system, bundled inside a Xorcom XR3000 appliance. I’m proud to say that I had some involvement in the development of this product, mainly, having trained the EasyRun lead developers in the workings of Asterisk – in the first Asterisk Bootcamp that was held in Israel last year. The EpicAcce appliance is defined as a PBX agnostic contact center solution, thus, it will work in any type of PBX or enterprise installation – making it the ideal solution for any company wishing to embed a contact center to their customer care, without the requirement of changing their entire company telephony infrastructure. In addition, the same unit can also be used as a the company PBX system – after all, it is based on Asterisk underneath and FreePBX as the management interface for Asterisk.

Asterisk gains recognition by the TheMarker.Com

About 3 weeks ago, I got interviewed by Amitai Ziv, a telecom reported from the TheMarker.Com IT news section. The interview (in hebrew) is available at the following URL:

http://it.themarker.com/tmit/article/6255

Now, while the article had mentioned about 25% of the actual interview and also summed up various statements from other people two, in general, it was very supportive of the Asterisk initiative and movement in Israel. I guess, well at least from my point of view, this article is a valid turning point – where the Israeli main stream industry acknowledges Asterisk as a valid business viable solution. In addition, as the founding father of the Israeli Asterisk users forum (www.asterisk.org.il) it is a great honor to be interviewed for this magazine. Sure, I make a living from promoting Asterisk and developing Asterisk based platforms, but having your face (although a horid picture) in the paper and having your name mentioned in a positive manner – is always a good thing.

Israeli Telecom Manager Club recognizes Asterisk

Yesterday I attended the “Israeli Telecom Manager’s Club” quarterly meeting, which was focused entirely on the viability of Asterisk and other Open Source based solutions. While most of the audience was made of large companies and captains of industry (Coca-Cola, TEVA, Israeli Electric Company, others) – I didn’t get the dreaded lazy eye I got almost 3 years ago.

When I started promoting Asterisk in Israel, almost 7 years ago, people looked at me as the crazy guy that has no idea what he was talking about. After all, I was an IP/Web technologies engineer, suddenly, starting to talk about telephony – in a world where 50 year old engineers were controlling and dominating entirely. Suddenly, a new kid on the block comes in and says: “Listen, Open Source can do it as good – if not better“. Yesterday was a turning point, suddenly, all these people came in to listen to me, preach and promote, both Asterisk and proper Open Source adoptation and GPL compliancy.

Israel is changing, companies start realizing that using GPL and modifying GPL products isn’t something to be taken lightly – it must be done with experts, and people that actually know what they are doing in the Open Source world. The old time Open Source geeks are starting to gain the industry recognition – Israel is finally starting to reach the state where the US and Europe are currently located at.

Digium announces availability of Support Services

This is not the first time Digium had tried doing this – first time was about 2.5 years ago. The current support services are based upon a signed service agreement, allowing the customer to receive phone based support services. According to the Digium website, the pricing model is as following:

                               SMB L1   SMB L2   Enterprise L3   Enterprise L4
Included Systems (Servers)        1         1          Up to 5         Up to 10
Included Cases (Incidents)        2         5             10           Unlimited
Additional Server Price           —         —          $495.00         $395.00
Named Contacts                    1         1             1                3
Price - 1 Year Subscriptions   $595.00  $1,995.00     $3,995.00        $7,995.00

Ok, not that I have a problem with that – I guess in the world people are willing to pay upto 300$ for a support incident – however, in Israel, that makes no sense. Judging from my experience supporting Asterisk, over 90% of the support calls can be resolved in less than 30 minutes. Charging an amazing price of 300$ for remote hands support, for an incident of 30 minutes – that is outragous. It’s true, I’m a Digium fan and I promote their products where ever I go, however, in Israel – this model will not cut it.

My company, started rendering Asterisk support services in Israel back in December 2008. Our support model is completely different – making it ideal for the Israeli market. Our support model is based upon a base line service agreement, indicating that you pay a total of 2,300 Israeli Shekels (around $500) for up to 10 hours of phone based and remote hands support services. These are rendered for a single server only – additional servers will cost you a couple hundrad more shekels, but the overall agreement in terms of time remains in tact. People in Israel know that support cases happen once every few months, so paying an identical price for getting 2 incidents handled simply doesn’t make any sense in the Israeli Market.

TDM400 Compatible GSM Module

ASTERISK GSM MODULE

A new product on the market introduces a GSM module to the ever popular Digium TDM400P card. The new module, available at http://www.asteriskgsmmodule.com/index.html is a plug-in for the TDM400P card, allowing it to accept a GSM SIM card – instead of the standard FXO module.

Finally, a plug-in for Asterisk that negates the need to work with a GSM converter. The bad thing is that it requires a patch to the wctdm.c Zaptel driver, and aparently, isn’t yet available for DAHDI at all – but I guess this will be fixed in the short future. I surely hope that these guys will contact Digium and maybe introduce the driver into the main stream driver distro, after all, Digium doesn’t make GSM modules – so it’s no competing with any Digium product.

Last night I met with a friend of mine, Mr. Doron Ofek. For those of you not familiar with the Open Source market in Israel, Doron is the one person most affiliated with RedHat in Israel, as Doron championed the adaptation of RedHat Linux servers in various enterprises and government offices in Israel. Doron is currently heavily involved in the OpenMoko project and its adaptation and promotion in Israel.

We spent a great deal of time last night, talking about the various aspects of Open Source training in Israel – as both us provide various training services to this market sector. While I’m mostly focused on Asterisk Training, Doron is focused on Linux and XEN training. Both of us have some our training routes knee deep in Israel’s computer/IT training companies, namely Matrix, Hi-Tech College and John Bryce. We both talked about our discontent with their inability to promote and market Open Source training courses, simply because they have no idea what these are.

For example, while Hi-Tech college were incapable of signing up a single person for an Asterisk Bootcamp course, I had signed up 10 people to a my first bootcamp – without any marketing or sales budget, simply by putting out the word in the right places. Now, Hi-Tech college has a list of over 5000 people who studied Linux and other Open Source and networking subjects in their college – should have they been able to gather up at least 10 people as well (less then 0.5% of their entire customer base)? the answer is a definite yes, why were they unable to do so? simply because they have no idea what Asterisk is, how it can be marketed, how it can sold and how the customer should be approached.

Doron had indicated a similar issue with both John Bryce and Matrix – however, due to other reasons. However, Doron had managed to sell quite a few training courses for Linux on his own – without any help from the big boys – how did that happen? how is it possible that Doron and I succeeded where the other colleges had failed? how can that be? – then we both realized why eventually, proprietary software will die and the Open Source movement, over the course of time, will simply negate the presence of proprietary software – simply because Open Source people provide for better marketing strategies and methodologies.

Did we learn how to do marketing on school? are we marketing people by nature? the answer is NO – we learned how to market our belief in the Open Source initiative over the course of time. We championed Open Source in various enterprises, events, public speakings and other places. We were the “soap box” speaker at Hide Park’s Speakers Corner, we were that crazy man on the street screaming: “The world is coming to an end, repent!” (well, you know what I mean) – but all in all, as time progressed we learned how to market the Open Source initiative and our belief – the large enterprises are stuck in their own belief and stagnant marketing strategies and plans. As time progressed, the various “champions” left the large enterprises, simply because they got fed up with the wrongful methodology of these and followed their own path – and doing so with moderate success.

In my belief, as time will progress, the large enterprises will surely migrate to the Open Source, and I won’t be surprised if within a period of 5-6 years Microsoft will be shipping out a version of Windows that is based on the Linux Kernel – or another Open Source distibution methodology. Call me crazy, call me chaotic, call me a dreamer – but mark my words – this will happen.

Last time, I’ve contemplated upon the various aspects of being an Asterisk consultant, mainly judging these from the Asterisk/Open Source point-of-view. Today, I’d like to contemplate upon a different approach of being a consultant, mainly, the various aspects that are usually not associated with Asterisk consultancy, however, can increase your overall perception by your prospective customer.

Be Targeted, Don’t be Limited

Most Asterisk consultant tend to restrict themselves to the Asterisk arena, at best, they will expand their knowledge into the realms of SIP and networks – but never beyond that point. It is true that telephony makes for over 80% of the Asterisk consultancy world, however, Asterisk isn’t limited to telephony only. More than 40% of the people using Asterisk are utilizing it for something completely different. Ranging from simple IVR to complex Micro Payment systems, Asterisk is there. Surely you can consult about Asterisk, but imagine the benefit your customer will gain if you are able to advise about other issues as well?

You are most probably saying: “I’m an Asterisk expert, I can’t be a **** expert as well!’ – you’re not being asked be one. You are being asked to expand your horizons beyond the Asterisk realm, being asked to be able to answer preliminary questions about various subjects. Over the course of my work I’ve been asked about subjects as: Google Adwords, Business Models, possible business partners, applicability of solutions and many more. Surely, there are people more qualified than myself to answer each of these, however, being able to answer my customer in a short time yielded something interesting, my customer became more at ease consulting with me about other matters as well – sometimes surpassing the realms of VoIP and Networking. When I was unable to answer I always replied with: “I’m not an expert about this, but I can check it out”. If I had an answer I would reply: “Per the information that I have, the answer is ………., however, I do suggest talking to someone more skillful than I on these matters”. This approach yielded an interesting response from my customers, mainly, their appreciation at me being able to supply a form of preliminary answer for a question – while on the other hand admitting at the same time that I’m not the best at this field.

Subjects that are fairly close to Asterisk include: GPL compliance, programmatic approach, platform design, billing considerations, scalability and redundancy and more. Again, always target your knowledge to Asterisk and VoIP, but don’t be limited to these.

Advocate for GPL compliance

As a consultant, you’ll be asked to perform various projects – some of these will most probably clash with the GPL spirit. If you encounter such a request, turn down this project immediately. There is no use or advancement by doing a project that violates the GPL code of conduct. No matter if you’re violating GPL v1, v2, v3 or any other of the Open Source license variants, at the end of the day, it will creep up behind you and bite you in the behind.

An Asterisk consultant who doesn’t advocate for GPL compliance is an outbound liar and a con-man. Consulting for the Asterisk market is prmoting the usage of GPL and Open Source software. Performing projects that violate both put you into the position of being perceived as a consultant without any code of conduct and no personal believes. You will be perceived as only being interested in money, thus, you will attract the type of customers you don’t want to attract.

Business Partners

The business partners you choose tell much about yourself. Sometimes, the big partners, which you really want to put their logo on your website as a partner is the wrong partner for you. Since the Q4 2008, my company had been approach by multiple companies wishing to become partners with my company – many have been declined. They were declined due to a simple reason – they were the wrong partners, even if they were companies generating over 25M$ of income per year. Does it make me sound stuck up and elitist, maybe, but there is no use partnering with a company that may clash with your own business model. Just like customers, partners tend to attract one another. Team up with the wrong partners, you’ll start attracting the wrong partners all over.