And "WOW!" what a year it has been. I can tell you that 2005 is already shaping up to be an amazing year for Xten. With this in mind I thought it would only be proper to send out some thank you's. I would personally like to thank everyone at Xten for making Xten software the industry's leading SIP software end point firm. It is so good to see such dedication, even now the engineering team is finalizing a build for eyeBeam 1.1 which is slated to go live tomorrow afternoon - Christmas Eve. Thanks to all who have believed in us, none of this would have been possible without you. Thanks to everyone who have made SIP what is is today and what it will be tomorrow. Thank you all for supporting the open standards bodies and making IP communication the foundation for a real global village. Take care during the holiday season and don't do anything I wouldn't do
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! -Erik Lagerway
December 2004 Archives
Just in time for Christmas, the X-Lite SIP softphone for Linux is now in beta. Those of you interested in getting your hands on it should email linuxbeta at xten.com.
Video over IP is gaining in popularity, the Vonage / Viseon announcement is one indication of that. It is expected that Vonage will be making use of the eyeBeam Video softphone from Xten once the hardware pilots have been completed.
Yesterday marked the demise of yet another middleware provider Syndeo Corp. The writing is on the wall. Feature-rich P2P end points are the future, everyone knows it. "VoIP holds the promise of integrating voice communications with other technologies to create a set of customized and personalized applications," said Keith Nissen, a senior analyst with In-Stat/MDR. "Where today's services are associated with a connection or a device, VoIP services will be associated with the subscriber, and will be accessible from any device, anywhere, over wireline or wireless access networks." There is a paradigm shifts coming our way in the communications industry very soon. Open standards P2P will play a big part in that. There is already a stir in the IETF circles about a P2P standards draft. There are very well known industry professionals working on this as I write this. The vision is to create a global P2P network with only standards-based end points as the fabric that holds everything together. That means no super-nodes or servers. The big bonus here is that there is no single point of failure, no server to bring you down or preclude you from signing up. No one company would own the network and therefore no one entity would control the network. There is the potential here for excellent revenues with the use of several mechanisms within the network and outside of the network. Anything from micropayment-based services to PSTN and media services. We will start seeing this become a reality in 2005.
In this article Craig Miller, Intel's VoIP platform marketing manager, told internetnews.com that the companies have inked a broad development partnership in which Intel is supplying AT&T with several reference architectures for routers, access points and other communications equipment based on Intel's IXP 425 processor. What is not said is "who is providing the softphone interface and logic?". Could it be Xten ? Could very well be. more...
Open Standards Presence and Centralized Contact Storage The latest release of the eyeBeam 1.1 SIP softphone introduces Instant Message and Presence capabilities to the already extensive range of features. Additionally, standards-based local and server-side storage features have been adopted for the management of address and resource lists. The free server, known as LiveEye is provided as a binary along with source code when the eyeBeam SDK is purchased. A Presence Agent module [for SER] is also included. LiveEye was built by Xten to demonstrate the extended server-side XCAP and WebDAV capabilites of eyeBeam 1.1. Xten customers interested in these capabilities will benefit by having access to the BSD server components in unrestricted source code format. This should prove to be very beneficial to those interested in building their own XCAP Server. eyeBeam SDK 1.1 introduces the following SIP-based instant messaging, presence and storage management technologies: -> instant messaging -> contact-list management -> privacy management -> peer-to-peer presence -> server-based presence -> server-managed contact lists -> server-side contact-list/privacy-list storage using WebDAV or XCAP -> server-side contact-list sharing using XCAP -> server-side privacy management using XCAP -> automatic updates to contact-lists/privacy-lists -> automatic updates to server-managed contact-lists A technical description of the Instant Message and Presence capabilities supported by eyeBeam 1.1 SDK and the LiveEye XCAP server. eyeBeam 1.1 SDK and the LiveEye XCAP server are due out on December 21st.
The stuff dreams are made of! Xten started in November of 2002, we had our first product in Beta trials in March of 2003. By May of the same year we were cash-flow positive! By the end of the year we had over 110,000 actively deployed endpoints, 12 people and almost cash-flow positive. I don't think anyone was expecting Xten to go from a 3 person startup in a tiny office in Vancouver to a 30+ person industry leader with offices in Santa Clara, Dallas and Vancouver in under 2 years. Now look at us! Financial Highlights for the Second Quarter 2005 Increase of revenue by 583% to $677,364 (Q2 2004: $116,014) Net loss of $198,275 (Q2 2004: $25,938) Financial Highlights for the First Six Months 2005 Increase of revenue by 347% to $1,164,515 (6M 2004: $335,036) Net loss of $397,932 (6M 2004: $54,904) With over 20 countries under our belt, more than 630,000 actively deployed endpoints and a 600% increase in revenue over last year, we certainly have nothing to complain about. Things are going so well in fact we are moving our research and development facility to a larger office space in downtown Vancouver at the end of the year, the Sun Tower Xten is taking the entire 8th floor, the last floor before the dome tower starts. It's a really cool old building, at one point it was the tallest building the British Empire! Now, if anyone has questions about our future, just ask our newly appointed member to our Board of Advisors over at Yahoo!. I am sure he will be able to give you some perspective. Email your questions to [email protected] and I will be certain to pass them along to my friend Graeme Dollar.
The grumblings in the industry are that SPIM [Instant Messaging SPAM] primarily and SPIT [Internet Telephony SPAM] will cause major headaches for network admins the world over unless something is done ASAP. The last thing anyone wants, except for those dreaded spammers, is to see the same SPAM issues we have seen in email now show up in IM and Voice and Video over IP. As we move into open standards for IM [SIMPLE, XCAP, MSRP] we will see growth that could easily cripple networks when coupled with SPAM. We need to cut this off at the pass before it get's out of hand. IM will eventually replace email, we need to be prepared for SPAM and handle it better than we did email SPAM. Security needs to be addressed from several levels, not just the enterprise. It's not enough to use IM Logic, Sybari or Zone Labs. There has to be a system that makes the entire spamming process so difficult or expensive that they are stifled before they start. There are proposed solutions which will see the light of day soon, hopefully it's soon enough!
I was having a conversation with one of our recent members of our techical board, Graeme Dollar of Yahoo!, he had this to say about Xten ... "I see Xten as being the leader in SIP softphone development today and for the foreseeable future. Their eyeBeam SDK has been very well designed and I can see it being adopted by many large service providers. They have done an amazing job and I am proud to be part of it by serving on their technical advisory board." It would seem as though Mr. Dollar is feeling quite comfortable with Xten's ability to provide companies, not unlike Yahoo!, with the technology they need in order to go to the next level. That could mean that open standards Voice, Video and Instant Messaging is not far off for some of the larger IM providers. This is very exciting as it will make IP communications easier to integrate, deploy and manage for large providers and enterprises alike. 2005 is really shaping up to be a very exciting year for SIP and IP communications in general.
