CUPERTINO, CA - December 8, 2000 - Time's up and the cake is baked ! The record attendance at the 6^th SIP Bake-Off, held this week in Cupertino, sent a strong signal to the Internet telephony industry, reinforcing SIP as the unifying technology for heterogeneous communications applications.

A proposed standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), SIP is an open and generic protocol for setting up, managing and tearing down interactive communications, from basic Internet telephony calls to advanced sessions that merge otherwise separated applications such as voice, instant messaging, video and chat.

Paving the way for widespread and successful SIP deployment, bake-offs are regular engineering gatherings at which the best of what the SIP industry has to offer is put to the test. While bringing traditional rivals together, bake-offs are nevertheless organized as a neutral testing ground and mutual support from participants is the rule. "The SIP community is motivated by the absolute necessity for Internet-wide interoperability and scalability. Bake-offs are important milestones for the growing SIP industry as they combine specification fine-tuning with advanced, multi-vendor testing," commented Emmanuel Bertrand, CEO and CTO of Indigo Software.

This latest Bake-Off was heavily oversubscribed, reflecting the concrete acceptance of SIP by software developers, equipment vendors, IP carriers and service providers. Participating companies linked up a record number of SIP phones, SIP soft clients, SIP servers and SIP gateways in various configurations. "With 59 different organizations attending, the Bake-Off demonstrated that SIP is becoming a mainstream protocol within the VoIP industry. The bake-offs greatly improve interoperability and robustness of emerging products," said Henning Schulzrinne, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Columbia University, New York, and co-author of SIP.

"With such a broad range of working implementations and successfully executed complex call scenarios, participants were given a real picture of how actual deployment is viable," added Laurence Grognard, Head Software Engineer at Indigo Software.

As another indication of SIP maturity, some advanced teams also had a unique opportunity to test early implementations of other SIP-based developments such as the IETF's Call Processing Language (CPL) as well as its Presence and Instant Messaging protocols.

More information about SIP and SIP bake-offs can be found at :
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/bakeoff

About Indigo Software

Indigo Software is blazing the trail in absolute Internet communications^TM by marrying the power of SIP with the unlimited possibilities of Java. Designing and delivering communications software truly tailored to the Internet, Indigo offers unprecedented solutions to the exploding Service Providers market. Indigo products radically transform the end user experience of integrated communications.
http://www.indigosw.com

For further information, please contact :

Edward Keegan Business Development Indigo Software +32 2 235 09 45 edward@indigosw.com

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December 8, 2000 - SIP Industry Uplifted as Record Participation in its 6^th Bake-Off
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