Ivelin and I have known each other for many years; he’s the classic technology entrepreneur with a brain that can hop between deep technology discussions to a business discussion without a moment of hesitation.  He founded Mobicents an Open Source VoIP Platform to help create, deploy, manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of Telestax, an Open Source Cloud Communications company that helps the shift from legacy IN/SS7 telco networks to IP based cloud comms.  An early investor in many start-ups, he still finds time to code for his companies and contribute to open source projects.  He was one of the first sponsors of TADS (Telecom Application Developer Summit), and an inspiration in getting TADS started.

I asked Ivelin some questions around TADS, I’m doing this so we understand the rich diversity of desires driving TADS.  Remember this is a grassroots initiative by people committed to creating a profitable and sustainable telecom application developer ecosystem.

AQ: What excites you about TADS?
II: The opportunity to meet in one place and openly trade knowledge with the best telecom developers in the world.  This is the kind of drinking from the fire-hose meet-up that web developers have enjoyed for years. It’s well overdue for the telecom hackers.

AQ: Why did you choose to sponsor TADS?
II: Because we felt like we need to do something more than wish for an event like this to happen. Telestax decided to step up and help with the initiative any way we can.

AQ: What are the important topics you want to discuss about TADS?
II: We don’t want to hear any high level, strategic business, pie in the sky talks. We also don’t want to see vendor pitches of black box products that are sold to telco executives. We want to see true developers show to each other and to telecom decision makers how technology innovation works.

AQ: What does Telestax do?
II: Telestax is in the business of making telecom innovation simpler. The company leverages the Open Source background of its core team at Apache, JBoss and Red Hat to disrupt the telecom technology market. Telestax is the primary sponsor of the Mobicents family of projects, which has been supported over the years by a number of telecoms such as Orange/France Telecom, Algar Telecom, Portugal Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Vodafone, Free France, Twilio, Cisco, Avaya and many others.

AQ: Why should Telecom Application Developers come to TADS?
II:  Join the Collective Intelligence of the Mobicents community and benefit from the fastest growing real time communication platform that saves costs and enables differentiating Value Added Services.

We’re putting a TADS pre-conference questionnaire together for both developer and telcos attending the conference to express their views to ensure we cover the issues that matter to them.  I know it’s a little unusual to be asking the people attending an event what they want beforehand, but it seems to be a good way to ensure the event delivers the most value.  Some of the questions Ivelin asked to be included in the questionnaire are:

• What is your current percentage of revenue from direct sale of core services to subscribers (SMS/MMS, voice, data) vs value added services?
• How do you anticipate this percentage will change over the next 3 years?
• What is the percentage of budget allocated to upgrading the core network vs the budget for enabling and launching VAS?
• How do you see these budgets changing in relation to one another over the next 3 years?