Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Gizmo5 is Now Part of Google's Family

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Yesterday Google announced the purchase of Gizmo5, a SIP Service provider, that is being around for quite sometime. And I already received some emails questioning about Jingle's future in Google, as Gizmo is a fully SIP based services. So here comes the summary:

Why Gizmo5 and not Skype or other VoIP Service Providers?
  • Gizmo uses SIP, which is an Open Standard. Buying anything closed and proprietary would cost Google a lot of money and huge drawback on integrations.
  • Gizmo is a much more open and known for its interoperability with other SIP Providers. Skype has absolute ZERO interoperability and it is mainly a closed P2P service, which Google already solved in a way more elegant way.
  • Main focus on calling from and to PSTN. Last thing it needs is another P2P Service.
What happens with Jingle on GTalk now?
Nothing! Google needs the flexibility that it offers and specially the natural integration with XMPP Wave Services. I don't see Google releasing Wave Services over SIP for now.
Jingle is by far the best solution for Internet Calling, and this is not a fact only mentioned by XMPP fans, but also by SIP Developers (Asterisk, SER, YATE, etc...).

Will GTalk support SIP now?
That is a tricky question, as there are two very close solutions, with pros and cons that I can't judge from Google's perspective what is better. Basically Google can solve it through:

  1. Jingle/SIP Gateway, XMPP has a very reliable way to interconnect legacy gateways. Nimbuzz for instance already have all its SIP Services working through their XMPP Jingle Clients. They support third party SIP Providers and recently they also have released an embedded solution for calling to PSTN called NimbuzzOut.
  2. Include a SIP Stack in Google Talk Clients. Which is not big deal. As we are plenty of SIP client side solutions and it is very easy to embed.
The point here is that I personally don't think Goggle is willing to implement SIP on  their widgets of web chat voice/video solutions like we have already on GMail. Making Jingle/SIP a necessity anyhow if they also want to allow their users place calls to PSTN also from a Website Flash Widget.
IMHO Google will probably go for a Jingle/SIP gateway, solution that I quite like for two reasons:
I already build such solution, and it works incredibly good! And has great scalability as well.
I also worked last year in the draft specification document that describes the integration Jingle/SIP Interoperability in Media Sessions.
If Google allows me to suggest: Go for Jingle!

4 comments:

  1. I suspect you're correct about the Jingle/SIP gateway, but i think that it will come at a later point.

    I believe that Google has purchased Gizmo5 so that they have a SIP endpoint to their Google Voice product. For a long time Gizmo5 has been the only officially supported SIP provider for Google Voice, and Google buying them gives them greater control over this.

    I think what will happen is that firstly Gizmo will be more tightly integrated into GV, so that when you sign up for GV you can also then log into Gizmo5 using the same credentials.

    After that i expect Google will allow a Jingle endpoint to their GV product, allowing people to receive and make PSTN calls from either SIP or Jingle clients.

    Eventually i expect that Google Voice will be rolled into Gmail, and when that happens we'll see the Jingle/SIP gateway, allowing open communication between Jingle and SIP on different domains, and making Gmail pretty much the ultimate portal for your communication, whether it be email, IM, audio or video.

    But for the short-term i think that Gizmo will merely serve as SIP access to your Google Voice account (although i don't think Google will shutdown Gizmo's current federation with all other open SIP providers).

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  2. Some SIP voodoo seems like it would be good glue between Google Talk and Google Voice.

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  3. Jingle/SIP Gateway, XMPP is number one. hehe

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  4. Later it appeared on 10cc's second album, Sheet Music (1974) on the track "Old Wild Men",. It then appeared again on their 1975 hit single "I'm Not In Love" where it is used as a haunting background cello drone throughout, as well as a surfacing echo to multi-tracked pre-recorded voices in the middle and closing sections of the song. The Gizmo also appears sporadically throughout 10cc's 1976 "How Dare You" LP.
    greetings

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