[asterisk-biz] SIP fundamentals & Kamailio training

[Alex Balashov]

Hello,

Over the past eight years or so, Evariste Systems has run a commercial
SIP fundamentals training and Kamailio training curriculum around 15
times for various customers, predominantly in the North American market,
but also a few times overseas. 

As a premier provider of Kamailio consultancy and open source-focused
SIP expertise in North America, we have also published numerous
technical articles on SIP and Kamailio-related topics that have become
somewhat canonical for their subject matter:

http://www.evaristesys.com/blog/kamailio-as-an-sbc-five-years-on/

http://www.evaristesys.com/blog/server-side-nat-traversal-with-kamailio-the-definitive-guide/

http://www.evaristesys.com/blog/tuning-kamailio-for-high-throughput-and-performance/

http://www.evaristesys.com/blog/sip-udp-fragmentation-and-kamailio-the-sip-header-diet/

Along with the leverage afforded from nearly a decade and a half of
open-source SIP platform engineering consultancy, we have had the
opportunity to refine it, incorporate rich customer feedback on what
works and what doesn't, and gain an improved understanding of how to add
the most bottom-line business value through a relatively short training
engagement. I wanted to take a moment to introduce it to a broader
audience in the hope that perhaps it could help other companies. 

SIP fundamentals training
=========================

The SIP fundamentals training is available as a separate module, but is
prerequisite to Kamailio training, which is what most customers
ultimately request--though we have had numerous engagements for SIP
training stand-alone. 

While we have run the SIP training for entry-level audiences entirely
fresh to IP telephony, the ideal audience is a Tier 1 to Tier 3 support
organisation of an ITSP or VoIP infrastructure company; that is, it best
serves technicians who have some "folkloric" exposure to VoIP
troubleshooting and enough context for what it entails that they could
really benefit from some extensive formalisation of that knowledge. 

For those types of customers, the commentary we've received is that it
really helps technical and nontechnical stakeholders make conceptual
connections and illuminate relationships that improve their
troubleshooting ability, as well as arming them with the terminology and
vocabulary to efficiently communicate with equipment vendors and
carriers, articulate interoperability quirks, file bug reports, and
report service-affecting issues with the immediacy and precision of
deeper SIP experience.

Because of the ITSP focus of our consulting work, the SIP training
fundamentals curriculum--while sufficiently broad--gives special
attention to topics of interest to service providers, including PSTN
interworking, fax, early media, NAT/ALGs, TLS, etc.

Kamailio fundamentals training
==============================

Our approach to Kamailio training is, I would like to think, a bit
distinctive: "teach a (wo)man to fish". 

The design of our Kamailio fundamentals curriculum is enlightened by the
key recognition that there is a lacking in high-level, conceptual
orientation about how Kamailio works, how to get started, and, most
importantly, how to learn to put its many pieces together for onesself.

Thus, the curriculum has no pretense of making a Kamailio expert out of
anyone in a short time or conferring an elusive "mastery"; the focus is
on giving the audience an awareness of the tools and setting up a mental
ontology of the things they need to empower themselves to learn and
develop their Kamailio knowledge further, as well as to traffic fluently
in the vocabulary and concepts required to ask the right kinds of
questions of the user community from a place of superior awareness. 

We've had great success with this approach from a pedagogical point of
view, and have received positive feedback from many customers for whom
this was just the jumpstart they needed to metabolise Kamailio on an
enterprise level and wire it into their organisation's "technical DNA".
Many have gone on to build advanced SIP service delivery infrastructures
using Kamailio, including load balancers, NAT traversal gateways,
registrars, redirect servers, and SIP application-specific gateways.

To speak the language of Kamailio requires speaking the language of
standards-based SIP, so the SIP fundamentals training is ordinarily
prerequisite to the Kamailio training. They are most often delivered
in succession as part of one engagement, but both have been delivered on
an a la carte basis.

Interested?
===========

If you are interested to learn more about what these training options
can do for you, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly, or
via the contact details below:

-- 
Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC

Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) 
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/