WIN Talker

Jonathan Rosenberg got what he wanted when he came to dynamicsoft in 1999 — and it wasn't necessarily part of his compensation package.

He wanted to be a thought leader. And that he is. Since graduating from MIT in 1995, having earned a BA and MS degree simultaneously, Rosenberg has been working to lead a particular thought: Session initiation protocol (SIP) is inevitable. He has done his part to turn that thought into technology and, with the help of an entire industry, transforms that technology into applications and those applications into services that help people communicate the way they were meant to — which is when they're good and ready.

Co-authored by Rosenberg and professor Henning Schulzrinne while the former concurrently earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University and toiled away in the belly of Bell Laboratories, SIP is the call control standard that will transform today's Wireless Intelligent Network (WIN) into tomorrow's next generation network. And tomorrow is already here — the transformation has begun.

Due in large part to Rosenberg's evangelism, his participation in various working groups within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and — oh yes — his REAL job as chief scientist for SIP software developer dynamicsoft, SIP has emerged as the call control standard of the 3G Partnership Project and the linchpin that will drive the eventual interworking of both wireline and wireless infrastructures.

Based on his work with SIP and SIMPLE (software extensions of SIP), MIT recently recognized Rosenberg as one of 100 top innovators whose work in business and technology is profoundly influencing today's world. “My work on SIP is a pretty good pride point for me,” Rosenberg said. “It is clearly the most important and successful work I've done.”

At the age of 30, Rosenberg has plenty of time in which to make worthwhile contributions to technology. But if he is right about how services enabled by SIP technology, particularly its inherent presence capabilities, will transform the network — and millions of dollars of capital investment says that he is — then his feat with SIP could be hard to top.

One industry analyst said, “When I get around someone like Jonathan Rosenberg, I realize that for whatever reason, when it came to brain power, all things aren't equal.”

As a thought leader, Rosenberg must spend half that brainpower working with groups within the IETF to solve interoperability and other issues with various protocol extensions. The other half is spent with dynamicsoft's customers. Increasingly, those customers are wireless operators like BT and Deutsche Telekom, and at least one unnamed customer in North America is deploying SIP-based technology and services nationwide.

Wireless was the second choice for dynamicsoft and other SIP-based technology vendors that initially targeted wireline carriers. However, companies were forced to follow the money. And the money and risk-takers appear to be in wireless.

“A small company like ours needs to be nimble and move as market trends move,” Rosenberg said. “SIP's strength has always been new and innovative applications, and in a down economy, that's a very difficult sales pitch to make.”

Still, despite the down economy, Rosenberg said the problem for dynamicsoft in the beginning was not so much finding a market as deciding on which market to focus. “There were so many people interested in SIP, it was hard to know where to focus. But that's generally a sign that an industry is maturing,” he said. Given the support and importance it has across different markets, Rosenberg said, “SIP one way or another is an inevitability.”

Gartner analyst David Fraley agreed: “A single signaling protocol across all of the networks — wireline, wireless, cable, enterprise, it doesn't matter — coupled with a common network architecture is really the true key to the next gen network.”

SIP is central to such a common infrastructure. It allows for a more Internet-style network architecture, which means the intelligence and resources are distributed throughout the network rather than centralized as they are in the traditional IN. Perhaps as important, one particular capability SIP enables that fundamentally changes the way services are built is presence.

Presence extends the concept of instant messaging beyond knowing if a “buddy” is online to knowing whether that buddy wants to communicate. Eventually, with intermedia communications, presence will determine whether a certain type of media message should be delivered to someone based on the type of device that person happens to be using at the time.

Enabling that presence in the wireless world will compel wireline carriers to get behind SIP and its extensions as they try to maximize services across both wireless and wireline platforms. However, even with the amount of attention SIP and the services it enables are getting, Fraley thinks the market will have to endure a few more years of stagnation before things change.

A substantial change would likely require that the migration to 3G be completed, or at least restarted, but Rosenberg said SIP does not have to wait for 3G, and that wireless can and will take the lead in deploying the new services they enable.

“There is a home for IP- and SIP-based applications today,” he said. “We are seeing SIP everywhere, in prepaid calling cards, in voice-over-IP — I mean, SIP ships with every copy of Windows XP. Their whole communications strategy is built around it.”

And therein lies another new twist in the evolution of the intelligent network — wireless or otherwise. It's the new players. By nature, SIP is an open standard. It is not locked up in the proprietary protocols and databases of the carriers and operators. The door will be open to many non-traditional communications players like Microsoft and IBM, and scores of smaller application developers.

“SIP allows a much more loosely coupled model for the way applications get rolled out than in the traditional intelligent network,” Rosenberg said. “That means a lot less dependencies and a lot less integration. And it makes it a lot easier for players to get in the game and build applications.”

Of course, that's in an ideal world. The rush to SIP by a horde of new players can pose some short-term problems for Rosenberg and others within the IETF whose job it is to maintain a semblance of standardization among deployments. “In many cases, we are working to standardize stuff that is a bit of a proprietary mess right now in the industry,” Rosenberg said. “The problem is, technology has already been deployed; it's just not interoperable.”

Rosenberg gets no argument from Amir Zmora, product manager of SIP technologies at Radvision, a software test provider and leader in SIP and H.232 protocol stacks. Zmora said revisions to SIP are hard to keep up with. “We see history repeating itself. Companies thought H.323 was a simple protocol and went out and built their own software stacks. Then the standard continued to change. We see the same mistakes being made in SIP,” Zmora said. “No one will buy from you if your aren't interoperable.”

Enabling interoperability among vendors and carriers will be a daunting task, but at least one thing is working in its favor: “When you look at the people sitting in the standards bodies, particularly with SIP, they are the same people for wireless or wireline. There is a lot of commonality, cooperation and coordination across industries,” Fraley said. “You don't have Bellcore saying ‘thou shalt’ anymore.”

What you do have is a huge community of believers saying SIP is the key to the next generation network. “It's clear the technology isn't going to stop here,” Rosenberg said.