Philippe Sultan Application 2007

My name is Philippe Sultan, I live in Paris, France. I work as a network and systems engineer for INRIA, a french institute for research in computer science. I also contribute to the Asterisk IPBX open-source software as a developer.

History
I entered the Jabber/XMPP world with a background made of open-source programming (C, Java), IP and SIP based networks deployment and administration. At that time, I was searching to deploy a robust IM system for INRIA, and I quickly figured out that building our enterprise IM project off of XMPP software components was the way to go.

XMPP Projects
I'm involved in the Asterisk IPBX open-source project as a developer. My contributions mostly cover the XMPP modules. I also set up an XMPP server (jabberd2) for INRIA, which I am now maintaining.

Code
Three modules are related to XMPP in Asterisk :
 * the base XMPP stack ;
 * the GoogleTalk channel driver ;
 * the Jingle channel driver (only available in Asterisk SVN trunk).

All these modules were developed by Matthew O'Gorman, a member of the XSF, and I enthusiastically bring a continuous contribution by fixing bugs, building test cases and coding new features.

I am now focused on having the Jingle channel driver up and running, which makes me track the modifications added to the Jingle specifications on a regular basis. I recently had two Asterisk servers able to establish a Jingle session, the code is available in Asterisk's trunk revision.

Administration
I'm the administrator of INRIA's XMPP server, which serves about 15 concurrent connections, and 5000 users. I expect to have the number of users increase along with the new services we'll provided to them.

Plans for the future
VoIP integration to INRIA's XMPP infrastructure, definitely, with Asterisk being used as gateway! Having Asterisk's Jingle code working with other implementations is an exciting objective, too.

I'm also eager to dig into the Web XMPP clients available around.

XMPP - Why I like it
Several reasons for that :
 * high quality open-source implementations of servers and clients are available, which makes it easy to deploy and test XMPP infrastructures or code in progress ;
 * XMPP is flexible, just an example : integrating jabberd2 with our existing authentication database (5000 accounts) was a smooth operation, impossible to achieve with SIP without replicating the user accounts ;
 * XMPP is extendable, to VoIP, video conferencing, file sharing, ...

Also, I love to test, debug, implement code with the corresponding XEP near my keyboard.

Why I'm applying
XMPP, along with its numerous open-source implementations, is an incredibly valuable framework of new services for the enterprise. I'd really love to contribute in making XMPP the protocol base of new means of collaborative work.

Contact information
xmpp / sip / mailto : philippe.sultan at inria.fr

xmpp / Gtalk / mailto : philippe.sultan at gmail.com