SipXecs is a

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

enterprise communications system. It was initially developed by Pingtel Corporation in 2003 as a

voice over IP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

telephony server located in

Boston Boston is the capital and most populous city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the United States. The city serves as the cultural and Financial centre, financial center of New England, a region of the Northeas ...

, MA. The server was later extended with additional collaboration capabilities as part of the SIPfoundry project. Since its extension, sipXecs now acts as a software implementation of the

Session Initiation Protocol The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, and terminating communication sessions that include voice, video and messaging applications. SIP is used in Internet telephony, in private IP telepho ...

(SIP), making it a full IP-based communications system. SipXecs competitors include other open-source telephony and SoftSwitch solutions such as

Asterisk The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a Typography, typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star (heraldry), heraldic star. Computer scientists and Mathematici ...

FreeSWITCH FreeSWITCH is a free and open-source telephony software for real-time communication protocols using audio, video, text and other forms of media. The software has applications in WebRTC, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video transcoding, Multi ...

, and the

SIP Express Router Kamailio, formerly OpenSER (and sharing some common history with SIP Express Router (SER)), is an SIP server licensed under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. It can be configured to act as a SIP registrar, proxy or redirect server, and features pr ...

History

Development of sipXecs began in 2003 by Pingtel Corporation. In 2004, Pingtel adopted an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

business model and contributed the codebase to the

not-for-profit organization A not-for-profit or non-for-profit organization (NFPO) is a Legal Entity, legal entity that does not distribute surplus funds to its members and is formed to fulfill specific objectives. While not-for-profit organizations and Nonprofit organ ...

SIPfoundry. It has been an open source project since then. Pingtel's assets were acquired by Bluesocket in July 2007. In August 2008 the Pingtel assets were acquired from Bluesocket by

Nortel Nortel Networks Corporation (Nortel), formerly Northern Telecom Limited, was a Canadian Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. It was founded in ...

. Subsequent to the acquisition by Nortel, Nortel released the SCS500 product based on sipXecs. SCS500 was positioned as an open and software-only telephony server for the SMB market up to 500 users and received some recognition. It was later renamed SCS and positioned as an enterprise communications system. Subsequent to the Nortel

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the deb ...

and the acquisition of the

assets by

Avaya Avaya LLC(), formerly Avaya Inc., is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey, that provides cloud communications and workstream collaboration services. The company's platform includes unified commun ...

, sipXecs continued to be used as the basis for th
Avaya Live
cloud based communications service. In April 2010 the founders of SIPfoundry founded , a commercial version of the software.

Information

SipXecs is designed as a software-only, distributed cloud application. It runs on the Linux operating system

CentOS CentOS (, from Community Enterprise Operating System; also known as CentOS Linux) is a discontinued Linux distribution that provided a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream (softw ...

RHEL Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial Linux distribution developed by Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and CentOS St ...

on either virtualized or physical servers. A minimum configuration allows running all of the sipXecs components on a single server, including database, all available services, and the sipXecs management. Global clusters can be built using built-in auto-configuration capabilities from the centralized management system. SipXecs uses

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available, cross-platform, document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database product, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional database schema, schemas. Released in February 2009 by 10gen (now MongoDB ...

as a distributed and partition tolerant database for global transactions, includes

CFEngine CFEngine is a configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems, including the unified management of servers, desktops, consume ...

for orchestration of clusters and

JasperReports JasperReports is an open-source software, open source Java (programming language), Java reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as: screen, a printer, into Portable Document Format, PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, Rich Text Format, ...

for reporting. The management and configuration system is based on the

Spring Framework The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. The framework's core features can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the Ja ...

. sipXecs includes

as its media server and Openfire for presence and instant messaging services. SipXecs follows standards such as

(SIP), SRTP, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP), SIP and XMPP over TLS, and several Web standards including

WebRTC WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) is a free and open-source project providing web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication (RTC) via application programming interfaces (APIs). It allows audio and video communication and ...

WebSOCKET WebSocket is a computer communications protocol, providing a full-duplex, simultaneous two-way communication channel over a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection. The WebSocket protocol was standardized by the Internet Engineering ...

and

Representational State Transfer REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

(REST).

Adoption

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

was an early adopter of sipXecs. This initial 5,000 user deployment expanded considerably in the following years. OnRelay, a company in the UK, selected sipXecs for its fixed-mobile convergence solution sold to carriers. Colorado State University and Cedarville University of Ohio committed to sipXecs in 2010. Red Hat deployed a commercial version of sipXecs from globally in 2012. Under the SIPfoundry Higher Education Program (HEP) and as of 2014 Lafayette College, St. Mary's University, Messiah College, Colorado School of Mines, Carthage College deployed sipXecs to replace their respective PBX systems. SipXecs is used by small and large enterprises ranging up to about 20,000 users per cluster. SIPfoundry lists the following users on its Web site: Brevard County FL, Dutch Police, Easter Seals, Siemens Transportation, British Airways.

Availability

SipXecs is available for Red Hat Linux and CentOS. It runs virtualized in different cloud environments such as the

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment of ap ...

, the

Google Compute Engine Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enab ...

, the

HP Cloud HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud business unitJackson, Joab. "HP launches converged cloud business unit," Computerworld. January 14, 201/ref ...

, IBM SoftLayer, VMware

vCloud vCloud Air was a public cloud computing service built on vSphere from VMware. vCloud Air has three "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) subscription service types: dedicated cloud, virtual private cloud, and disaster recovery. vCloud Air also offe ...

and

VMware ESX VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware, a subsidiary of Broadcom, for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on ...

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software pla ...

environments, and clouds from other vendors using these technologies.

Licensing and Copyright

SIPfoundry distributes the sipXecs source code under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license. Many different corporate and individual contributors contributed to sipXecs, including Pingtel, Bluesocket, Nortel, Avaya, and as some of the larger corporate contributors representing 864,791 lines of code. In addition, the sipXecs solution includes many other open-source components. SIPfoundry holds Copyright on all

derivative work In copyright law, a derivative work is an expressive creation that includes major copyrightable elements of a first, previously created original work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent from ...

. Contributions to sipXecs are made under a Contributor Agreement, which grants SIPfoundry shared Copyright with the original author on all contributed code.

Hardware

SipXecs supports a wide range of SIP compatible hardware, such as

PSTN The public switched telephone network (PSTN) is the aggregate of the world's telephone networks that are operated by national, regional, or local telephony operators. It provides infrastructure and services for public telephony. The PSTN consists ...

gateways, desk phones, softphones and mobile phone applications. A plug n'play auto-configuration capability is available for phones from currently (software release 14.04) 18 different vendors.

SIP reference implementation

The SipXecs system represents a reference implementation of the SIP standard. It was used at SIPIT interoperability events organized by the SIP Forum to test interoperability of SIP solutions from many different vendors.

References

External links

SIPfoundry official website
{{Cloud computing Collaborative software Free VoIP software Instant messaging Open-source cloud applications Software using the GNU Affero General Public License