General Public Announcement
July 8, 2021
To our valued customers, partners, backers, and fans:
Keeping businesses, customers and people connected has never been as important as it has been in the past 16 months. With the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world began working from home, making all efforts to continue their operations at any capacity. For some businesses, these changes were effortless, but for most, the struggle and cost to adapt was staggering. SIPSTACK by design, is built to enable any business to adapt and rise to the new communication challenges with confidence by bringing secure, managed and affordable telecommunication environments to meet these pivotal demands.
Our technology started off like most have in today’s environment - in the virtual clouds only to make its way to IBM / Softlayer, a cloud company that brings high end Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) coupled with their global secured network, truly enabling our services to scale world-wide within their one-of-a-kind offering that no other company can match.
Recently, an event at the IBM / Softlayer TOR01 datacenter occurred affecting our Lenovo SR630 ThinkSystem equipment within our environment. IBM / Softlayer reported that the reason for the series of component failures were likely a result of firmware updates and advisories ignored. Advisories from Lenovo pre-dating our systems deployment. While technicians quickly rebuilt new systems, recovery of affected equipment containing data became top priority of ours to secure and recover. As a regulated company by the CRTC, we worked very hard to recover damaged equipment containing sensitive data to ensure public interests were protected, and any proprietary code. Despite several attempts at recovery, IBM / Softlayer refused to cooperate unless SIPSTACK Inc. waived an addendum limiting "IBM's gross negligence" for damages. We were only able to physically secure the damaged equipment weeks later that contained sensitive data after SIPSTACK retained special legal counsel and intervened. The data contents were completely inaccessible and without risk during that time due to the nature of the damages to the equipment.
As a result of this event, and with our pleading attempts to resolve this matter amicably with IBM / Softlayer, we unfortunately remain at a standstill while all our contracted services remain unsupported, leading us to announce today that SIPSTACK Inc. will no longer be able to provide secure managed hosts across the IBM / Softlayer global network and will be releasing our unified communication software as open source for anyone to download and run within their local environments.
While our teams have been working overtime re-configuring our code to remove any IBM / Softlayer architecture & SDK integration to fully prepare the solution for use on any network, with any voice provider, we expect to release the code to github within 90 days of this announcement.
We fully understand the depth and impact this decision has, but re-iterate our team remains fully committed to the platform and the community. Please continue to follow us on our website and social media for upcoming announcements.
Thank you kindly,
Jonathan Geller
Chief Executive Officer
Code
Future release of the open source SIPSTACK will be made available on GitHub, updates will be posted both on our website and on the readme.
IBM Cloud Correspondence
Full disclosure, reference to related case conversations within the IBM / Softlayer unified support system.
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At this time, our software was built around the IBM / Softlayer Cloud infrastructure, with deep dependencies around their services. We have not yet found a suitable partner that would enable us to provide a truly secure managed environment. At this time, we are preparing to release our Unified Communications Software (UCS) on our github page.
Previously sent notices were emailed with indication your regional hosts have temporarily migrated into a third party datacenter while we continue to investigate. While these migrated hosts will continue to serve your customers and business, you will be required to deploy our open source Unified Communication Software (UCS) in your own designated environment before December 31, 2021. We will work closely with your team in relation to the release date to assist with these efforts. All current settings, call logs, text messages, email and any other data related to your customers will follow your new hosts when deployed. We will be refunding you all charges related to the MRC services specifically for the managed hosts within the IBM / Softlayer datacenter's.
At this time, we are reviewing all possible ways to offer the "full suite" of services without compromising security and integrity. We are also reviewing the possibility of terminating our telecommunications license with the CRTC citing these events as cause.
While anticipating a positive resolution from the IBM / Softlayer team in response to the event, we remain challenged, and un-supported collectively resulting in this decision to announce the termination of our managed service offering in place for an open source self hosted solution. Any fees collected since activation within the affected regions be refunded in full. We will continue to leverage our temporary third party datacenter's facility until we can migrate your services to your self hosted system.
Our software was built around the IBM / Softlayer Cloud infrastructure, with deep dependencies around their services. We have not yet found a suitable partner that would enable us to provide a truly secure managed environment as a result of these events. At this time, we are preparing to release our Unified Communications Software (UCS) on our github page.
At this time, we are continuing to work with our General and Special Counsel in regards to the matter. We will be spending additional time reviewing damages in economic terms before filing claim with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.
In addition to SIPSTACK's investment partners, the project is Federally backed by the Government of Canada and we will be reaching out in the coming weeks with regards to our public obligations & requirements and if independent inquiry to the the event will take place.
Finding an alternative to IBM / Softlayer cloud is not as easy as switching between cloud vendors. We have made tremendous investments in the IBM Cloud architecture enabling us to offer advanced UCaaS because of their very unique offering.
We have announced today that SIPSTACK Unified Communication Software will become open source indefinitely.
Beyond an amicable resolution with IBM / Softlayer, we would need further assurances from them particularly regarding their support and commitment to their customers to enable us to be in the position to provide a reliable managed offering within their global network. The IBM / Softlayer CSA for their cloud metal offering may have contradictory statements with regards to customer obligations, these agreements require a refresh bringing much needed clarity.
All correspondence to the IBM / Softlayer support threads are available at: https://www.github.com/sipstack/ibm_softlayer-gross-negligence (github.com)
These virtual providers are truly great and capable platforms. Although many company like SIPSTACK will eventually graduate the limitations of virtual environments when their applications requite bare metal / access to system kernels. Most of of our API's and non hardware dependent services have already migrated into these virtual clouds as a result of these events. However our Unified Communications Software (UCS) is hardware dependent, and was specifically built with IBM Cloud architecture at its core.