Wowha what happened to the last 3 months?

So best laid plans and all.. I was going to spend sometime this new year building loads of cool VoIP and IM cost saving projects - but the day job kinda got in the way. So what's new and what's really been going on in my head around cost savings and VoIP for businesses in the economic downturn?

Well I have actually completed one project in my lab - A skype to SIP gateway is now up and running. Wey-hey! Actually really cool for quite a few reasons:

• My Asterisk PBX now talks Skype, so as a small business I'm now always online, well virtually anyway. My Aeonvista skype account can be connected to my PBX which customers, friends and family can now skype me for a VoIP call and my PBX can do all that clever find-me follow-me routing and even play and IVR message or leave a voicemail, which can be emailed to me anywhere.
• My Oracle Contact Centre Anywhere application can now call out and receive incoming calls from Skype, so I can do agent based routing and screen pop for calls coming in over skype.
• For Site to Site traffic I also have a cool NAT savy, encrypted, VoIP VPN.
• For travelling when I would have used my IAX softphone to get through those double NAT Hotel hotspots to phone home for free, I can now just use skype, call my family on the house phone without needing a PC at home turned on or them all crammed around the laptop.
• My OpenFire IM server which has and Asterisk plug - now has a Skype plug-in, without having a Skype plugin if you follow, at least for VoIP calls, no IM sessions. But its a start.

Been working closely with the CCA product for a couple of customers and been on a full time contract - so been a little strapped for time.

Also been tinkering around the edges of IPv6 on my Vyatta router. I now have a 16-bit subnet of IPv6 address space - Hmm not sure what I'm gonna do with that yet, but can at least play with some OSPF v3 and MP-BGP set-up to get my head around IPv6. Also I've not got the version 5 release of the Vyatta software to play with so lots more tinkering to do.

So the Office/Lab is in refurb mode, which was partly caused by a living room redecoration - I know but some how the living room refurb spread to the office. The good news is whilst the lab is down for a little while, I get to install one of these beauties from Kell Systems http://www.kellsystems.com, This means all my kit keeps cool and quiet.... That means the lab now really is a study which the family can use. Now for the wide screen Flat panel TV and AV set-up in there and we're getting there.

So at least one of the ideas for cost saving got off the ground - Skype to SIP gateway that seems to work pretty well and has some other side effects in my lab.