Nortel Snags Pingtel

Nortel today announced their acquisition of Pingtel, a commercial SIP telephony platform derived from the open source sipX Enterprise Communications Server. sipX began in 1999, but in 2004 Pingtel contributed the codebase to non-profit organization SIPfoundry and it was subsequently made available under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). Pingtel also continued to develop a commercially licensed version of sipX marketed under the name sipXchange.

The open source sipX project counted Asterisk as its main competitor, although sipX varies significantly from Asterisk in many ways. Unlike Asterisk, in sipX all call signaling is handled natively using the SIP protocol. sipX contributes call signalling and is not concerned with media and encodings, while calls are set up and packets routed point to point between endpoints. sipX also lends itself to a modular, distributed approach where individual hosts can be deployed to handle specific duties such as SIP proxy and media server.
Pingtel’s most noteworthy enterprise deployment was announced in 2006 for Amazon.com, and reportedly serves as many as 5000 users.

Today’s announcement actually marks the second sale of Pingtel, having been acquired in July 0f 2007 by Burlington, Mass based parent BlueSocket.

It will be interesting to see if Nortel’s competitors in the traditional enterprise telephony market will look to make similar purchases. Companies such as Adtran, Cisco, Avaya and Mitel could be eyeing the likes of Digium/Asterisk, Trixbox, FreeSwitch and others as Microsoft’s OCS initiative shifts into another gear.