The greatest challenge of my work is to explain exactly what our business unit is doing: Friend: “What exactly it is that you’re doing?” Me: “I am a Product Manager” Friend: “Yes, but of what products?” Me: “Well, we cater for VoIP developers” Friend: “VoIP?” Me: “You know, when you use Skype to call people over the internet? That’s VoIP” Friend: “Oh, so you do Skype?” Me: “No. Not exactly. We enable companies who want to develop products like Skype to do so. But not Skype. Skype is proprietary.” Friend: “So what do you do again?” You get my drift. The TBU (Technology Business Unit) develops standard compliant VoIP protocol stacks and SDKs for developers, who then develop their own products. That’s a mouthful. And now that we have a new video clip, it should make it a lot easier to explain what I do to my friends: Hope you’ll like it as much as I do.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 17th, 2008 | Filed under Miscellaneous
Last month I asked the question do communication protocols need to be Swiss Army Knives or penknives. I also asked the same question in LinkedIn Answers. The (almost) unanimous answer I got was penknives. The best part of it was actually getting two great acronyms to use for that do-it-all protocol: Steve Michelson suggested GPPTDE: General Purpose Protocol That Does Everything Cedric Mauvielle suggested SAKF: Swiss Army Knife Protocol Cedric believes a SAKF (or a GPPTDE)
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 4th, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks
You can do everything with SIP: Voice over IP, video telephony, presence, instant messaging, SMS, MMS and much more. Sometimes it feels like SIP is a protocol invented by a salesman: “Oh, you are looking for a solution that starts the microwave when you get to your driveway after a long day? Sure we have it - SIP!”Last week I wrote about XMPP versus SIMPLE, where both are used for presence and SIMPLE and utilize SIP for its transport. A
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | July 21st, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks, Standardization
Once a year, RADVISION’s TBU division holds a road-show in Asia Pacific. In these events, we travel between different countries, meeting clients and holding seminars. Our road-show for 2008 starts today. Seminar in Taipei during the 2007 road-show Now, that the IMTC SuperOp 2008 event is over, it is time to look forward on what will happen in the next two weeks. The road-show is a very exhausting event - it spans four different countries, usually in less than two weeks. In each country, besides the frantic runs from one meeting to another there is a seminar. During the seminar we present the various market needs of the industry along with our solutions - all this is “seasoned” with live demonstrations. This year’s theme is “Development for innovative multimedia application for IMS/NGN”, in which we cover market trends, relevant protocol stacks, client and server frameworks and testing tools. The seminar is relevant for companies who are developing VoIP communication products. In the next two weeks, we will be traveling around Asia, with countries such as Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan on our tour this time. If you are around, you are hereby invited. Just drop me a message.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 19th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
The IMTC’s SuperOp! event is just across the corner, and this time, I am proud to say that RADVISION will be hosting it (pdf). Companies coming to this event will be testing their products for interoperability. There are parts of the market though, that are ignoring interoperability. From my own experience, they pay dearly for it in due time. Interoperability can be viewed as a process where you hurtle your product against a product of a different vendor and
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | May 1st, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability
[I've had a chat the other day with a colleague of mine, Danny Loeb, who is the Product Manager for our SIP Server Platform. As part of his work, he needs to deal with the multi-core trend and how that changes the architecture of his product.] Multi-core is all the rage these days. Or at least this is what Intel tell us - almost every month Intel arranges a seminar, workshop, training or some other session about multi-core here in
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By guest | April 21st, 2008 | Filed under Technology
No company today is capable of developing its products in-house without using 3rd party software. In most cases the process starts from outsourcing the operating system itself, continues with outsourcing specific protocol stacks and user interface engines, etc. These come from vendors which are sometimes called ISVs (Independent Software Vendors), middleware vendors or various other types of manufacturers.I came across Åse Stiller’s guest post on VisionMobile, where he recommends vendors build an end-to-end flowchart of how source codes of their
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | April 14th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
Megaco is back for another round, like the phoenix, it re-emerges after burning to ashes. Why now? IMS, of course…Megaco, also known as H.248, is a standard used to decompose multimedia gateways. If you’re developing a large scalable gateway, with a lot of multimedia processing, then splitting the logic of the application from the “dirty” processing of the media itself is a wise thing to do. In such a case, the communication protocol between the logic and the media can be Megaco - and this is exactly what is done in IMS when developing MRFs (Media Resource Function). Now, prior to IMS, I’ve seen Megaco demand from customers fluctuating - every year or two, the demand lowers, only to rise again a year later. Now, Megaco, as the Phoenix it is, is rising again from its ashes for IMS - and it’s doing it gloriously. There are a lot of companies out there developing products for the IMS infrastructure - those developing gateways or other media servers are in need for Megaco. If you are looking for Megaco stack, then search no more.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | February 14th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
The way in which communication standards are implemented is usually done through protocol stacks. Companies will usually acquire such stacks from third parties and not implement and maintain on their own. How does one select a protocol stack? What makes a protocol stack of one vendor better than that of another? 1. Support Support is definitely the most important aspect of a protocol stack. VoIP products are complex - developers building such products will need all the help they can
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | January 17th, 2008 | Filed under Protocol stacks
