Why SIPfoundry decided to offer support

原文链接：https://www.sipfoundry.org/sipfoundry-decided-offer-support/

 

Our users and partners told us again and again that support is critical for the production deployment of an open source solution like sipXecs. We agree and that is why we decided to offer professional support for our sipXecs platform going forward.

Up until now we mainly relied on a commercial offering from our partner eZuce. An estimated 10% of the sipXecs installed base benefits from it and I heard it many times that the quality of the support and the team at eZuce are great. However, we think we can do much better and offer support to many more of you who are using sipXecs in production today. Purchasing support through eZuce requires a transition to a commercial edition, openUC, which many of you told us is contrary to the idea of deploying an open source solution. The SIPfoundry support offering combines the best of both worlds: it gives you an open source solution that meets all the criteria for production deployment, and without having to switch to another product after the initial testing and evaluation.

We think it is paramount for SIPfoundry as a community and organization to remain self-sufficient and independent. We are doing what you told us is the right thing and we will continue to put the community first. 

Being dependent on a commercial partner for most of our development removes the community from participation in roadmap decisions. We have seen critical components of the sipXecs solution become unmaintained as our commercial partner is no longer able to support them. With repeated layoffs at eZuce over the last several months the developer team working on sipXecs has shrunk to under a handful of people. This state of instability and decline is of great concern to us. It is another important reason to move forward with a support offering of our own.

SIPfoundry has had several key commercial partners over the years, including Pingtel, Bluesocket, Nortel, and eZuce. During each transition the SIPfoundry community provided continuity for the users of sipXecs. And we have always been open to any and all commercial companies with an interest in our technology and community. Our software has proven itself as a lean solution running in the most modern cloud environments. Our vision is to create a SAAS service produced in the private containerized cloud. If adding real-time communication into your offering is part of your plans, and without having to re-invent the wheel, you know where to find us.

The support offering helps us finance the necessary investment to execute on this vision. We have demonstrated that sipXecs can handle significant loads and a large and distributed user base with ease. The next thing we have to accomplish is make it significantly easier to deploy and use, and to make it much more appealing from a user interface and experience design perspective. Expect more communication on roadmap in the future.

As a first step it is critical for us to get our support offering off the ground. This requires a minimum of cumulative 5,000 users to sign-up via our pre-ordering process. We will let you know as we go along how this is coming together.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding this step, our offering, or SIPfoundry in general, send it to us. We are focused on the community and strive to do the right thing.

 

Looking forward to a continuing great collaboration 

Martin J Steinmann
Founder, SIPfoundry