VOIP Today magazine (www.voiptoday.org) is happy to carry on exclusive interview with with Diana Cionoiu CEO and founder of Null Team, the company behind Yate.

VOIP Today magazine spoke with Diana Cionoiu about Business, technology and products.

VoipToday.org: How can you see Yate among its competitors?

Diana Cionoiu: The telephony software market it's a very wide place. It's mostly covered by proprietary solutions from companies like Cisco, Avaya, Sonus. Yate provides solutions for the a market that was traditionally proprietary.

That it's possible due to constantly providing good technical support, tested software, custom applications, new features, bug fixes, a very good record on security issues (last one reported 3 years ago).

VoipToday.org: What is Yate's attitude to problem solving?

Diana Cionoiu: “Feedback is the breakfast of champions”. I believe that a strong knowleagble community like Yate's can help a lot on creating a good software.

In addition to that I also believe that is important to check and verify software before releasing. It's always better to fix a problem before the customer finds out about it. Testing is a very important part in software development. Especially when it comes to applications that have high demands from systems like telephony servers.

VoipToday.org: What is your current product, and what distinguishes it from the rest?

Diana Cionoiu: FreeSentral is our latest product. It is an free IP PBX based on Yate. It's focused on creating an easy-to-configure system by providing useful IP PBX and user friendly features like: a wizard for your first configuration, a demo, voicemail and much more. Besides all that, FreeSentral has features such as call forward, call fork, call logs, call transfer, conference, call pickup.

VoipToday.org: What were Yate greatest implementations?

Diana Cionoiu: Luxvoice and Gradwell used Yate for some of their implementations. Luxvoice is an open source carrier-grade softswitch based on Yate and other software. Gradwell has a system partially based on Yate. I can say Yate's implementations are so different from each other thanks to the way it was build.

VoipToday.org: What makes it different from other open source systems in the VoIP/telephony field?

Diana Cionoiu: One of its' core characteristics is that Yate is a true telephony engine and, more importantly, can act as a telephony engine. Modifications are easy to implement and new modules can be added with ease.

Another important aspect is that Yate supports protocols as: SIP-T, dissociated SS7, SIGTRAN, Jingle. I am not aware of many open source systems that have support for both ISUP and SIP, which are a must for SIP-T

Even though Yate is an open source project, the team strives to provide the same level of code quality, support and testing as any other proprietary telephony vendors.

VoipToday.org: What were the greatest achievements scored by Yate?

Diana Cionoiu: We've realized that around 5 million users are using Yate one way or another. Nevertheless, I'm a hopeless optimist. I'm sure great achievements are yet to come.

VoipToday.org: What is the next step for Yate?

Diana Cionoiu: There are two directions for Yate development right now. One is the development for alternative carriers which includes features like Sigtran, SS7, SIP-T, Cisco Session Manager, ISDN passive recording.

The second one is Unified Communications. I believe that the future of telecommunications belongs to integration and services. We are focusing on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol to add integration between different technologies like presence, messaging and telephony. Also we are contributors to the Jingle protocol (the voice protocol for XMPP).

VoipToday.org: Does Yate support any kinds of platforms like Skype and OCS?

Diana Cionoiu: Yate can work with both Skype and OCS. However for Yate to work with Skype, users will need subscribtion for “Skype for SIP Open Beta”. OCS uses SIP so Yate is also compatible with OCS.

VoipToday.org: What is Yate average annual growth rate?

Diana Cionoiu: Since Yate's main market is custom telephony applications, most of the installations have a large number of users. It's hard to estimate the annual growth rate in this conditions.

VoipToday.org: What is the average cost for an integrated solution provided by Yate?

Diana Cionoiu: Yate is used by all sort of different systems: from embedded systems to huge systems for millions of users. The cost of an integrated solution depends on the type of implementation.

Also, we do provide what we say we provide. This creates an open and stress-free relation with our customers and guaranties implementations that are truly cost effective.

VoipToday.org: How did the world’s recession affect Yate?

Diana Cionoiu: Surprisingly, the world's recession allowed us to grow faster. Mostly because Yate is a cost effective solution.

VoipToday.org: How can you predict market expansion opportunities in the future?

Diana Cionoiu: Services, services, services. I think that services and not networks are the future. And Yate does a great job providing flexibility, stability and low costs to the tomorrow service providers.

VoipToday.org: Do you carry on any special events or exhibitions?

Diana Cionoiu: We are thinking about organizing a free tutorial in Romania this winter. So that both users and developers join together for a few days and share experience and knowleage.