Spencer Dawkins Named Technical Director of SIP Forum

The SIP Forum (News - Alert), an industry association with members from many leading IP communications companies, has named longtime member Spencer Dawkins as its new Technical Director. Dawkins currently works as Senior Standards Manager at Huawei (News - Alert) Technologies in Plano, Texas.

“SIP continues to serve as the main engine for IP communications innovation and is helping drive the rapid pace of change in today’s telecom world,” Dawkins commented. “As SIP Forum Technical Director, I look forward to working with SIP Forum key stakeholders – leadership, our task groups and members – to ensure the Forum continues to fulfill its mission of advancing the global adoption of SIP.”

Spencer Dawkins has a long history in the communications industry. He has worked on TCP/IP standards since 1989 and has participated in the Internet Engineering Task Force since 1996. For the ITEF, Dawkins has co-authored multiple Requests for Comments. He has served on the General Area Review Team and the General Area Directorate. On four separate occasions, Dawkins has served as a working group chairman.

Prior to his work at Huawei, Dawkins held the posts of software developer, manager, systems architect and product planner at Nortel (News - Alert), Fujitsu, Cyneta Networks and Inet/Tektronix.

“My role,” Dawkins explained, “will be to help our task groups continue to deliver sound technical recommendations and guidance to the industry which answer important questions, eliminate roadblocks, solve problems and ultimately address outstanding issues that might otherwise slow SIP adoption in enterprise and carrier IP networks.”

The role of the SIP Forum is to promote SIP as the technology of choice for communicating via the Internet, wireless networks and corporate networks. The Forum’s main interests are product interoperability, disseminating information on the capabilities and benefits of SIP, and showcasing successful deployments and SIP applications.

As Technical Director, Dawkins will work with the Chairman and the Managing Director to translate Forum priorities into actionable task groups. Groups that Dawkins will work with include the SIPConnect Task Group, the SIPConnect Interoperability Certification Task Group, the Test Event Working Group, the Fax over IP Task Group and the User Agent Configuration Task Group.

Dawkins decade of experience with industry standards groups gives him unique insight into the goals and objectives of the SIP Forum. He holds both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Texas.