FAST FORWARD with Shawn Lewis

Quick talk about what's next

Whether developing the industry's first softswitch or proposing new business models, Shawn Lewis never shied from stirring up traditional telecom mentality. Lewis, now president and CEO of Caerus, spoke with Vince Vittore about softswitch evolution, existing models and the industry's ills.

On current softswitches: Technology always has to change. Time division multiplexing didn't change. Softswitches didn't change. What has changed, though, is communications. Softswitches are based on telecom, not communications. You need to make them application engines. The softswitch is dead, as we know it. Communications has broken itself down to an operating system. It doesn't have any functionality to it.

On the motivation behind his offer of a free softswitch: Everyone was building around session initiation protocol call flows, so we built an engine based on any event that could occur. Because it's an engine, it's not stuck to these call flows. You can make it talk to a router if that's what you want.

On open platforms: What's going to jumpstart packet communications? You need to regain the trust of the community that uses packets. Our methodology dates back to Xcom. It's a managed service, but we've taken it a step further. We have a managed IP PBX that's free. We have a CTI development kit for free. And you get four ports for free. It's very much like the Microsoft development environment.

On the thought process: Anything can be distilled down to methods, properties and events. Protocols like SIP and H.323 are just properties. Working off of that are the methods. We feel we'll be able to gain the trust of the carriers because there's no capital expense to them. The applications can be located on any processor.