EARTHLINK'S FLING WITH VLING COULD VALIDATE OPEN SOURCE

EarthLink is offering, on a trial basis, a free, downloadable soft client for a potential voice-enabled messaging service called Vling. The implementation of the underlying signaling stack from Pingtel, a company that adopted an open-source business model 18 months ago, encouraged the open-source community last week that their day is about to come.

To EarthLink, Pingtel's SIP stack just happened to be the best available. However, to the open-source community that helped develop it, the implementation of the Pingtel SIPxua user agent was a perfect example of how an open-source business model works.

“We don't see it as coming from the open-source community,” said Tom Hsieh, director of voice product development and engineering at EarthLink. “We see it as coming from Pingtel. We evaluated several SIP stacks. Theirs was easy to use, easy to integrate and they were there to sell us a commercial license.”

The non-validation of open-source software might be the best sort of validation Pingtel and the rest of the community could get — provided the software works as advertised — because the technology was chosen on its technical merits. Although EarthLink has contracted with Pingtel, it is still evaluating the Vling client of which Pingtel's SIPxua product is a part.

Hsieh said that so far the feedback from EarthLink's free trial has been good, and the company is getting a better idea of how people will use Vling. Meanwhile, there seems to be confusion — or maybe just semantic differences — about the contract terms between EarthLink and Pingtel, with EarthLink saying it has licensed software, and Pingtel saying the software is free, but that they contracted for support and maintenance.

Either way, the SIPfoundry, an industry consortium whose mission is to accelerate the adoption of SIP and upon whose sipXtapi software development kit Pingtel's technology was built, sees the EarthLink trial as significant.

“[Customers] attract a lot of eyeballs,” said Martin Steinmann, treasurer of the SipFoundry. “There is now a market trend unfolding that will have a significant impact on the market in terms of accelerating and adopting standards-based solutions.”

Steinmann said questions still abound concerning whether IP telephony will move in the direction of proprietary silos or toward a globally interoperable system with feature transparency like e-mail. “When we founded the SIPfoundry, we obviously wanted the latter, and I think we have had a pretty big impact already in the last 18 months toward that objective,” he said.

His vision matches EarthLink's and is one that Hsieh said will change the behavior of consumers.

“The first step is to get voice instant messaging to the place e-mail is today, where regardless of your service provider you can connect with anyone else,” Hsieh said. “It wasn't always like that with e-mail, but when the dam broke it became a whole new world.”

EarthLink took that first step last week by saying it would interoperate with Google's similar service. Pingtel has been counting on that since it moved its SIP-based product — and therefore its entire business — into a Red Hat-like open-source model.

“A lot of people were skeptical about whether putting all our [technology] out to the open-source community would generate business. So [EarthLink] is a real validation on our model,” said Al Brisard, vice president of marketing for Pingtel.

Irwin Lazar, analyst with the Burton Group, said the EarthLink deal helps Pingtel by allowing it to point to a company that is using its product on a large scale, but it may fall short of validating its business model since that model was to focus on the enterprise market and compete with more traditional IP-PBX vendors.