sipXecs is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

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

voice over IP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of speech, voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms In ...

telephony server located in Boston, MA. The server was later extended with additional collaboration capabilities as part of the

SIPfoundry SIPfoundry is a non-profit organization that develops open-source telephone software projects based on the Session Initiation Protocol(SIP). Founded in 2004, SIPfoundry established ties with the SIP Forum. SIPfoundry promotes the standardization o ...

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 (IP PBX). sipXecs competitors include other open-source telephony and SoftSwitch solutions such as

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

FreeSWITCH FreeSWITCH is free and open-source server software for real-time communication applications, including WebRTC, video, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD. FreeSWITCH is used to build private bran ...

, and the

SIP Express Router Kamailio, formerly OpenSER (and sharing some common history with SIP Express Router (SER)), is a Session Initiation Protocol, SIP server licensed under the GNU General Public License, GPL-2.0-or-later license. It can be configured to act as a SI ...

History

Development of sipXecs was started in 2003 by Pingtel Corp, a Boston, MA based venture backed company. In 2004, Pingtel adopted an open-source business model and contributed the codebase to the not-for-profit organization

. 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. 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 and the acquisition of the Nortel assets by Avaya, Avaya has backed away from SCS in an effort to rationalize its product portfolio post acquisition of Nortel. The sipXecs solution continued to be used as the basis for th
Avaya Live
cloud based communications service. In April 2010 the founders of

founded . commercialized the sipXecs solution in close cooperation with SIPfoundry and the open-source community. sipXecs is typically deployed by enterprises wanting to replace a traditional

private branch exchange A business telephone system is a multiline telephone system typically used in business environments, encompassing systems ranging in technology from the key telephone system (KTS) to the private branch exchange (PBX). A business telephone syst ...

(PBX) with a software-based solution that can be produced in a cloud environment. In addition to telephony features, sipXecs offers collaboration capabilities such as enterprise instant messaging and conferencing.

Information

sipXecs is designed as a software-only, distributed

cloud application Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

. It runs on the Linux operating system

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

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

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 program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Serve ...

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

CFEngine CFEngine is an open-source 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, desk ...

for orchestration of clusters and

JasperReports JasperReports is an open source Java reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets, such as: screen, a printer, into PDF, HTML, Microsoft Excel, RTF, ODT, comma-separated values (CSV) or XML files. It can be used in Java-enabled appli ...

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 Java ...

. sipXecs includes

as its media server and

Openfire Openfire (previously known as Wildfire, and Jive Messenger) is an instant messaging (IM) and groupchat server for the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It is written in Java and licensed under the Apache License 2.0. History Th ...

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 to wor ...

WebSOCKET WebSocket is a computer communications protocol, providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection. The WebSocket protocol was standardized by the IETF as in 2011. The current API specification allowing web applications ...

and Representational State Transfer (REST). , Inc. holds the US patent on the architecture referred to as SIP Session Oriented Architecture or SSOA.

Adoption

Adoption of open-source solutions is difficult to quantify. SIPfoundry claims on its Web site that over one million users have downloaded sipXecs in small and large companies worldwide.

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential economi ...

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.com'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 ...

, 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 enabl ...

, the

HP Cloud HP Cloud was a set of cloud computing services available from Hewlett-Packard that offered public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, managed private cloud and other cloud services. It was the combination of the previous HP Converged Cloud bus ...

, IBM

SoftLayer IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

, 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 offers ...

and

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

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 plat ...

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 an original, previously created first work (the underlying work). The derivative work becomes a second, separate work independent in fo ...

. 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 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 The SIP Forum is a nonprofit organization devoted to advancing the adoption of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), a signaling protocol for use in initiating, modifying, and terminating an interactive session among two or more users that involve ...

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 As a service Software using the GNU AGPL license