SIP Forum Elects New Officials

SIP Forum snapvoip.blogspot.com
SIP Forum has elected new board chairman, Richard Shokley and Eric Burger as the chairman emeritus. Dr. Alan Jonston was also selected to the board of directors. Following is an excerpt from the press release. The complete press link could be found at the SIP Forum and the link is after the jump.

NORTH ANDOVER, MA (January 14, 2010) - The SIP Forum today announced the recent re-election of industry veteran and VoIP pioneer Richard Shockey to the Board of Directors, and the election of Mr. Shockey as new Board Chairman. Additionally, the Forum has re-elected Dr. Eric Burger to the Board of Directors and named him Chairman Emeritus, and elected Dr. Alan Johnston to the Board.

Meanwhile, the SIP Forum announced the reappointment of Marc Robins as Managing Director and President.

The elections were held during the SIP Forum's Annual General Meeting in San Francisco, on Nov. 3, 2009.

The elections of Shockey, Johnston and Burger, all industry trailblazers, complement the SIP Forum's already prestigious Board of Directors, which also includes Chris Gatch, CTO of Cbeyond; Steven Johnson, CEO of Ingate Systems; Glenn Russell, Director of Business Services at Cable Television Laboratories Inc. (CableLabs); Rene Sotola, a Vice President in the Global Telecommunications practice at CGI Group; and Robert Sparks, Principal Engineer at Tekelec. Each member of the Board of Directors serves a two-year term.
"I am honored to have been elected the new Chairman of the Board," said Richard Shockey. "I look forward to continuing to build on the solid foundation left by my predecessor, Dr. Eric Burger, and ensuring the successful completion of the important work in progress in the SIPconnect, Fax-over-IP and User Agent Configuration task groups. I also look forward to expanding the work of the SIP Forum into new and exciting industry sectors, including Smart Grid and Unified Communications."

SIP Forun Press Release

SIP Forum Creates Smart Grid Special Interst Group

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SIP Forum has created a Special Interest group to support Smart Grid;

The Smart Grid is the modernization of the electricity grid using communication technology with the primary goals of reducing energy consumption, reducing cost (utilities and consumers), increasing reliability and the creation of new services for all participants in the value chain.
While the current focus is on electricity, similar concepts can be applied to other utility systems such as water, gas, etc. Such a modernization has recently become a significant focus for governments, vendor communities (utility companies and partners) as well as Industry/Standardization organizations such as NIST, GridWise, IPSO, IETF and IEEE.
The Smart Grid architecture requires a ‘communications overlay network’ which can help facilitate ‘intelligent communication’ (discovery, session establishment, routing, addressing to name a few) between various nodes of the heterogeneous Smart Grid network.
Several of the standards bodies and organizations mentioned above are working towards identifying standards and protocols that meet the goal of a robust, secure and interoperable Smart Grid network.

 The SIG aims to deliver;

1. Create a ‘requirement feasibility matrix’ that maps the various smart grid requirements created by NIST, GridWise, DoE etc. with a mapping to whether SIP meets the requirements to be considered for further study (along with brief reasoning).
2. Outline usecases and sequence diagrams where SIP can be used vis-à-vis existing smart grid use-case diagrams already published (example, from GridWise).
3. Create and end-end network diagram of the smart grid network specifically depicting where the role of SIP could be.
4. Create a document that brings out areas which can be met with existing SIP standards and areas that need new extensions to SIP.
5. Create a whitepaper on how using SIP could bring in new & innovative services for the smart grid network in the future (while this may not be in the forefront of requirements by the smart grid industry, a peek ahead always helps in setting an appropriate vision of the future).

 We are in it, as we really like and envision the smart grid!
Smart Grid SIG at SIP Forum via Rich Tehrani