Meanwhile, in Russia...

Back from the Mobicents Community Summit 2011 - Sochi, Russia. Very untraditional place for a conference, but Oleg made it work for us despite the logistic nightmare. Technically the meeting was in Krasnaya Polyana, which is the winter resort place for the 2014 winter olympics, but other than being remote and very cold it doesn't really shine with anything at the moment. And there is a waterfall. The summer capital of Russia - Sochi was better, although I almost checked myself into a mental hospital in the middle of nowhere due to booking.com map glitch and poor travel guides.

---

The highlights from the conference include a couple of big moves from the business side:

• Ivelin officially announced Telestax will be taking over the commercial support from Red Hat, which will no longer provide JBCP support.
• Part of the Mobicents team left Red Hat, the main Sip Servlets team including me and the project leader Jean in particular. This should be good news for long-term Sip Servlets users who can be sure Telestax has the same support capacity in terms of talent plus more due to new hires. Any past investments in Mobicents Sip Servlets products should be well covered by Telestax in the future.
• SS7 appears very strong with Amit who is also moving to Telestax.
• Telestax also builds teams in the community for other Mobicents projects.

This spin-off occurs precisely at the peak of the community and customer interest. It looks like Telestax really has a shot now at becoming a success story in the telco market if it plays the cards right. In theory, Telestax should be able to perform much better without the JBCP restrictions by building quickly on top of what was learned in the past few years. I personally am not joining Telestax yet, but I will be helping there one way or another once I get some time off and sort through my options.

I also had to cover some of my own topics in the conference. These are the updated slides for the load balancer with a new roadmap. Didn't have much time to prepare because I was in Istanbul, but I pulled off a fuck it, we'll do it live :). I will be refining the slides further to reflect the discussions.