Evariste Systems

Veteran Kamailio experts, SIP platform engineers and trainers

Kamailio veterans

After 17 continuous years of experience building systems with Kamailio, we know what works, what doesn't, and the best way to do it!

We are also closely involved with management and advocacy of the project.

SIP expertise

We understand SIP protocol mechanics and standards at the deep level necessary for platform engineering.

This includes the complications of WebRTC (SIP over WebSocket), high availability, and more!

Passionate training

With our customers, we have developed and improved our SIP and Kamailio curriculums over many iterations, and have learned the best ways to teach audiences with different kinds of "technical DNA" how to fish.

Overview

Evariste Systems is a well-established VoIP consulting house focused on open-source infrastructure and platform-building for SIP service providers. We are based in Athens, a university town in northeast Georgia, USA, but we have proud Atlanta roots.

Headed by Alex Balashov from 2007, Evariste has grown up with open-source VoIP as it moved from cottage industry to increasing maturity, sophistication and consolidation.

Midtown Atlanta from Piedmont Park
Atlanta was a crucible of telecom expertise, entrepreneurial energy and early adoption in the mid-late 2000s, when we got our start.
Berlin - Hackeschermarkt area
Central Berlin, near Hackeschermarkt, where the annual Kamailio World conference is held. We habitually participate in and sponsor Kamailio World.

History and Background

After several years of employment background in the CLEC and VoIP service provider world, consulting in this area began in earnest in early 2008. The economic downturn rewarded a razor-sharp focus on the savings, value and disruption potential of high-quality open-source infrastructure at a time when many companies pared back investments in expensive "big brand" solutions. We did not have to adjust to a recession mindset to deliver big savings for our customers; savings were the vocabulary from day one!

Despite the challenging business environment of the time, Evariste survived and thrived by confronting and disrupting the traditional telco thinking that dominated service provider infrastructure. Among other endeavours, we provided the technical foundation for fast-growing service providers--mostly in the dynamic Atlanta telecom market and startup scene--who saw high-profile acquisitions by large companies throughout the 2010s. These foundations proved durable and adaptable, and remain in use.

We think that such large value creation on top of call processing infrastructures built purely from open-source vindicates the approach we honed in our humble beginnings at the bottom of the Great Recession.

Kamailio speciality

Most of our work has focused on Kamailio (formerly OpenSER), a high-performance SIP proxy and SIP server used to build, connect and scale VoIP service provider platforms.

Over 17 continuous years of Kamailio experience, both in product development and in a wide variety of deployments, allows us to offer rarely specialised expertise.

We have contributed patches and documentation to the project and have a seat on the project management council. We also sponsor the annual Kamailio World conference.

Kamailio table at Astricon 2018
The Kamailio project booth at Astricon 2018 in Orlando, Florida.
Chicago, seen from the Willis Tower
Overlooking a frozen Chicago in Feb 2014. Beyond hosting ClueCon, Chicago (our favourite US city) has been kind to us. Many former consulting customers based there have grown into big names!
Asterisk Africa, in Johannesburg
In 2018, we had the great privilege to visit Johannesburg and Cape Town. At Asterisk Africa, we had the honour to represent Kamailio, and were able to connect with our significant South African customer base.

Evolution

Around 2010, our consulting endeavours coalesced into CSRP, our Kamailio-based routing product for SIP trunking operators. CSRP has been our core business since 2011, and our main focus is on the development of CSRPv2, the next generation of CSRP to serve modern operators' increasingly complex needs beyond the traditional SIP trunking / Class 4 business model.

However, we continue to do some custom work for a small number of select customers, and we will probably always do so. We seek mutually high-value customer relationships, win-win solutions, and the imagination and energy of building new things.

For much of our history, we distinguished ourselves in the VoIP consultancy space with a focus on high-performance Least Cost Routing (LCR) and domain knowledge of PSTN interconnection in the US. Relatively few VoIP providers understood how the "other side" of the PSTN fence works, despite its technical centrality and impact on the upstream cost picture. Our background in the carrier world allowed us to bridge this gap.

This type of knowledge continues to serve us well, but the dominant themes of our work have morphed, mirroring general industry trends. Today, our skill portfolio also draws heavily on:

  • Docker, containerisation, configuration management, service discovery, and cloud-native architecture;
  • REST APIs, connectors and integration paths;
  • WebRTC libraries, browser communication APIs, JavaScript front-end development, and the interaction among these;
  • Mobile and browser push notifications;
  • CI/CD, end-to-end test automation, and automated deployment.

Beyond building, we love to share our knowledge and experience--in many cases acquired the hard way--to help others drive around common pitfalls and thrive!

Training

We entered SIP training because we thought we could do better. Like many others, we were tired of sleepy traditional corporate training. More importantly, however, we found that a lot of training in our area of expertise has a misplaced focus, and doesn't actually impart the learning needed for teams to gain self-sufficiency.

We love teaching and we love thinking and talking about teaching. Nothing has been more rewarding in our work than developing our training courses:

  • SIP Protocol Fundamentals - A deep dive into SIP mechanics, intended for moderately technical audiences such as support staff, telephony application engineers, web developers, and others who could benefit from a more complete formalisation of SIP knowledge that they have already encountered in parts.
  • Kamailio Fundamentals - An introduction to Kamailio for moderate to advanced technical stakeholders. This course does not attempt to comprehensively survey all Kamailio capabilities or explain all of its modules, but rather to empower the audience to seek these answers on their own by clearly underlining the most important starting points: the basic structure of the Kamailio configuration, truly key modules and what they do, how to navigate and understand the documentation as it is organised, key attachment points to the SIP transactional state machine, and more.

We have had the privilege to run both of these courses (they are often requested in tandem) in North America and overseas for more than a decade. Customers have ranged in size from the smallest service providers to well-known Fortune 100 multinationals and publicly-traded firms. All of them tell us they extracted significant value from our particular approach to training.

The feedback of our training customers over the years has been incorporated into our methods and material. Accordingly, the training value we can offer today is the marriage of our innate love of teaching this material with the culmination of many discussions with customers about what they found most and least useful.

We have had a long time to think about how we train. The key values of our training are:

  • Depth rather than breadth: we are specialists, and we teach like specialists. Some training companies pump out dozens of "canned" training courses; we have been training for a decade and only have two. We are serious about bringing you true value through non-obvious, non-trivial and actionable new information that comes from hard-won experience, not superficial information you can find easily elsewhere.
  • Teach only what we excel at: we are versatile engineers with passable--and in many cases, commercially viable--expertise across the full stack of technologies needed to build VoIP services. But we aren't equally good at everything, and we believe that the best teachers are massively overqualified in a narrow speciality. We would rather stick to the areas we know we can deliver top-notch expertise that is among the best in the country, and perhaps the world. For other areas, we will refer you to superior specialists among our colleagues.
  • Don't waste the listener's time: technical audiences have little patience for perfunctory treacle and needless introductory overviews. We jump right in.
  • No cookie-cutter approaches: every audience group has a different mixture of technical capacities, and bring different objectives to us. We care about what you want to get out of the training, not just what we find most convenient to teach.
  • Hands-on and immersive: most engineers are learners by doing. While we do utilise slides, we aim to break the mold of standard corporate training experiences and avoid droning on and reading slides as much as possible. Our training curriculum cannot be reduced to a pre-recorded video series precisely because we rely on participants to take part and learn as they go.
  • Engage individuals: teaching small groups is a privilege that should not be squandered. We believe that only personalised and situationally specific involvement in the training for every attendee can make lasting takeaways possible.
Distributed signalling vs bearer plane
We are passionate about teaching, and always looking to improve our slides and diagrams (which are yours to keep!) by finding the simplest way to impart the most salient information.
Alex Balashov presents at Astricon 2018
Alex Balashov presents at Astricon 2018.
B2BUA call legs
An allergy to complex pictures and multi-layered schematics pervades our office. Most of the time, more is less.
Big fat box to cloud migration
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We take aim straight for the questions on service providers' minds, the ones that no books, online documentation or mailing list archives definitively address.
Giant lava lamp
An illuminating gift from a grateful customer, who noticed that we were not fond of the available fluorescent lights whilst working on-site at his company's offices.
Buckhead
Our very first customer is based in the uptown Buckhead district of Atlanta, and they are still with us, going strong. (Don't let this new web site jinx it!)

Our customers

Our customers fall into two camps: product (CSRP) customers, and consulting customers. There is considerable overlap among them, and it is not unusual for a customer from one category to drift into the other.

Because CSRP is intended for service providers, CSRP customers are typically, though not exclusively:

  • VoIP providers who sell SIP trunking, whether retail or wholesale;
  • CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers) and analogous telcos made possible by local loop deregulation elsewhere;
  • Voice application service providers, e.g.
    • Hosted contact centre vendors;
    • Vertical-specific application vendors (e.g. hospitality, healthcare).

An important and growing segment is non-service-provider organisations in industries unrelated to telecoms, but who are large enough to have a dedicated telecoms apparatus that effectively provides voice service as though a service provider.

Significant consulting and training engagements over the better part of two decades have been with customers in the following categories, in addition to the foregoing:

  • Publicly-traded corporations, typically through acquiring one of our service provider customers;
  • Well-known data/API providers supplying much of the IP telephony industry;
  • Switch platform vendors;
  • Phone and videoconferencing companies serving the corrections sector;
  • Managed IT service providers;
  • Software companies who produce widely-used voice application frameworks and related services;
  • Companies who provide services related to the routing of emergency calls;
  • Financial services and insurance firms;
  • Notification services providers (e.g. appointment reminders);
  • Boutique consulting shops;
  • Major public universities;
  • Internet service providers and regional fibre-optic backbone operators;
  • Fortune 100 retailers.

While we cannot provide a complete or partial customer list for many commercial and legal reasons, we are happy to provide customer references privately upon request. Furthermore, as Alex Balashov supervises or carries out all projects, LinkedIn recommendations for Evariste generally redound to him personally: we encourage you to consult them.

Talks and articles

We have presented at many industry events over the years, including Astricon and Kamailio World, the latter of which we also sponsor. Most of our presentations shed light on Kamailio as an alternative to "big brand" Session Border Controllers (SBCs) and routing solutions popular in telco thinking, or opine on VoIP service provider industry trends.

Giving back to the open-source community that gifted us Kamailio is a core value. We make a point of providing assistance on the Kamailio user mailing list, including detailed information and configuration recipes where possible.

We also run a popular technical blog with in-depth Kamailio articles and technical tips. Some of these have acquired canonical status over the years in that they are frequently referenced in answers to common questions.

Kamailio as an SBC: Definitive Answers (Kamailio World 2019)
ITSPs in the Cloud: Changing Winds (AstriCon 2018)

Contact us!

Whether you are interested in licencing our software or contracting our consultancy and training services, or if you just want to drop us a friendly question or comment, we are always happy to hear from you!

We know you have a choice of vendors and we don't take your investment of time in reaching out for granted. Every effort will be made to respond to every enquiry as promptly as possible. By the same token, we will not abuse your contact details and will never send unsolicited marketing e-mails to you, nor shall we sell or otherwise provide your information to a third party.

Evariste Systems LLC
1860 Barnett Shoals Road
Suite 103-504
Athens, GA 30605
United States of America
All rights reserved. © 2023