14 Apr
2024
14 Apr
'24
2:59 p.m.
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
14 Apr
14 Apr
5:49 p.m.
Mahmood,
Alas, the business case for open-source telephony solutions is not self-evident.
Of course, being invested in open-source, we'd all like to think so. But this is a
reflection of our own competencies.
I have seen open-source telephony succeed massively, and deliver improved stability,
security, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and I have also seen--usually through
acquisitions--platforms based on free/open-source ingredients fail miserably. Acquisitions
of smaller companies for their perceived technical capital provide an important lens on
this difference, because the operational and engineering priors of a FOSS-based smaller
company may not consumable to the larger acquirer whose institutional knowledge is based
on traditional, big-brand, proprietary telephony systems.
So, it really depends on the company's "corporate DNA":
1) Appropriate skill set of the engineers who work there now;
2) The ability to hire, recruit and retain such engineers, with a specific view to company
culture and technology choices;
3) Management understanding of open-source, and the specific idiosyncrasies of open-source
projects and ecosystems, and which ones work best;
4) Management understanding of the capital and operational expense structure of
open-source infrastructure, and how this is weighted differently than for closed
proprietary systems. For example, open-source systems, by virtue of being more hand-build
and maintained entirely or substantially internally, suffer from more entropy, or
"bit rot", and so require an ongoing OPEX commitment. With a proprietary
platform, you pay the vendor for theirs.
In short, an open-source platform requires an engineering organisation that is largely
self-reliant, and a business that has the ability and the motive to assume more of the
"care and feeding" of its infrastructure. That requires having the right mix of
people, culture, assumptions and budget.
Not every company is a good fit for this. If prior experience, business processes and so
on are tailored to certain proprietary platforms, or if the company has a largely
sales-driven, not especially engineering-heavy constitution, for example, open-source
telephony may be a poor fit.
-- Alex
On Apr 14, 2024, at 7:59 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
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--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
7:19 p.m.
Thank you for the insights Alex!
Now that I give it more attention, the need for employees with the required skillset would
be challenging to find. And wouldn't like the company to suffer incase skilled
personals leave.
________________________________
From: Alex Balashov via sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 7:18 PM
To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
Cc: Alex Balashov <abalashov(a)evaristesys.com>
Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other
FOSS SIP software
Mahmood,
Alas, the business case for open-source telephony solutions is not self-evident.
Of course, being invested in open-source, we'd all like to think so. But this is a
reflection of our own competencies.
I have seen open-source telephony succeed massively, and deliver improved stability,
security, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and I have also seen--usually through
acquisitions--platforms based on free/open-source ingredients fail miserably. Acquisitions
of smaller companies for their perceived technical capital provide an important lens on
this difference, because the operational and engineering priors of a FOSS-based smaller
company may not consumable to the larger acquirer whose institutional knowledge is based
on traditional, big-brand, proprietary telephony systems.
So, it really depends on the company's "corporate DNA":
1) Appropriate skill set of the engineers who work there now;
2) The ability to hire, recruit and retain such engineers, with a specific view to company
culture and technology choices;
3) Management understanding of open-source, and the specific idiosyncrasies of open-source
projects and ecosystems, and which ones work best;
4) Management understanding of the capital and operational expense structure of
open-source infrastructure, and how this is weighted differently than for closed
proprietary systems. For example, open-source systems, by virtue of being more hand-build
and maintained entirely or substantially internally, suffer from more entropy, or
"bit rot", and so require an ongoing OPEX commitment. With a proprietary
platform, you pay the vendor for theirs.
In short, an open-source platform requires an engineering organisation that is largely
self-reliant, and a business that has the ability and the motive to assume more of the
"care and feeding" of its infrastructure. That requires having the right mix of
people, culture, assumptions and budget.
Not every company is a good fit for this. If prior experience, business processes and so
on are tailored to certain proprietary platforms, or if the company has a largely
sales-driven, not especially engineering-heavy constitution, for example, open-source
telephony may be a poor fit.
-- Alex
On Apr 14, 2024, at 7:59 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
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7:25 p.m.
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:19 PM, Mahmood Alkhalil
<mahmood.alkhalil(a)outlook.com> wrote:
Thank you for the insights Alex!
Now that I give it more attention, the need for employees with the required skillset
would be challenging to find. And wouldn't like the company to suffer incase skilled
personals leave.
It's not impossible, especially now that more tech jobs than ever seem to be remote,
or substantially remote.
However, highly skilled open-source practitioners in esoteric areas (like IP telephony)
are in high demand, and usually have strong leverage to pick their employers, if not
necessarily set their pay. They will often look for companies with strong
"open-source" DNA/mojo/chi/whatever word you want to use, whose technology stack
consists of fashionable and interesting languages, frameworks, and tools, and have other
smart, like-minded people working there to create a dynamic, experimentally oriented
energy.
This does not describe many established businesses, regardless of whether the offering of
the business is related to IT. Medium to large organisations, in particular, tend to
extract labour from consistent (if unextraordinary) output of everyday do-gooders, and not
the more stochastic and volatile heroics of open-source superstars. Thus, in a variety of
senses, it's easier to hire people "off the street" to do the things
involved in the provisioning and support of a Broadsoft than it is to hire people who can
deftly manoeuvre Kamailio or FreeSWITCH.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for that. That all depends. I think Jawaid,
Fred and I are both just quick to point out the potential downsides, since we all, in one
dimension or another, make a living in this stuff.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
7:31 p.m.
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:25 PM, Alex Balashov <abalashov(a)evaristesys.com> wrote:
Medium to large organisations, in particular, tend to
extract labour from consistent (if unextraordinary) output of everyday do-gooders, and not
the more stochastic and volatile heroics of open-source superstars.
Sorry, I meant to say "extract value" here, not "extract labour".
But the larger point is that any successful formula heavily reliant on open-source is
going to be a lot more dependent on culture, and on the strengths of individual people and
their specific skills, than a formula reliant on a third-party vendor, all other things
being equal.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
5:54 p.m.
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course this is an
obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the lack of any cost for the
software itself and no licensing / recurring license fees.
-- Fred Posner
Sent from mobile
Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733
qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
6:09 p.m.
The cost saving that will be the main reason before licenses is the amount of hardware
resources currently used, the system we are using in total is using around 128 GB of RAM,
64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage;
That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording for some with a
mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources
for phones which is using almost an entire rack.
If such can be reduced for two kamailio nodes and a couple freeswitch nodes for any IVR /
conferencing / voicemail that would at least lower the resources to the half of what being
used if not more, keeping in mind that Calls per second count and concurrent calls count
is really low.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the telephony system with MS Teams it will cost
70,000$ USD just for installation and basic configuration just to ring a deskphone when
someone calls you on Teams..
________________________________
From: Fred Posner <fred(a)pgpx.io>
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 6:54:49 PM
To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
Cc: Mahmood Alkhalil <mahmood.alkhalil(a)outlook.com>
Subject: Re: [SR-Users] Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other
FOSS SIP software
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course this is an
obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the lack of any cost for the
software itself and no licensing / recurring license fees.
-- Fred Posner
Sent from mobile
Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733
qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
6:39 p.m.
Hello,
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:09 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
The cost saving that will be the main reason before licenses is the amount of hardware
resources currently used, the system we are using in total is using around 128 GB of RAM,
64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage;
That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording for some with
a mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices for PRI lines and media
resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack.
While this sounds like a riotously inefficient use of hardware per unit of telephony
realised, such inefficiency is not inherent to proprietary systems, nor are superior unit
economics inherent to open-source.
What you're using sounds like it's just bad, assuming that hardware is truly
necessary and isn't just massively overprovisioned. If you're going to make the
argument that you should switch to something less OPEX-intensive, I don't know that I
would base it on the mere fact that the proposed alternative is open-source.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the
telephony system with MS Teams it will cost 70,000$ USD just for installation and basic
configuration just to ring a deskphone when someone calls you on Teams..
Maybe, but--and this is a mere hypothetical, I have no way of knowing--the cost in fully
burdened engineer compensation to implement all those things yourself might be quite a lot
more than $70K.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
6:40 p.m.
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would
be big $$$!
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 11:38 AM Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users <
sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
The cost saving that will be the main reason before
licenses is the amount
of hardware resources currently used, the system we are using in total is
using around 128 GB of RAM, 64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage;
That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording
for some with a mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices
for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an
entire rack.
If such can be reduced for two kamailio nodes and a couple freeswitch
nodes for any IVR / conferencing / voicemail that would at least lower the
resources to the half of what being used if not more, keeping in mind that
Calls per second count and concurrent calls count is really low.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the telephony system with MS
Teams it will cost 70,000$ USD just for installation and basic
configuration just to ring a deskphone when someone calls you on Teams..
------------------------------
*From:* Fred Posner <fred(a)pgpx.io>
*Sent:* Sunday, April 14, 2024 6:54:49 PM
*To:* Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
*Cc:* Mahmood Alkhalil <mahmood.alkhalil(a)outlook.com>
*Subject:* Re: [SR-Users] Real life examples of cost saving from using
Kamailio and other FOSS SIP software
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course
this is an obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the
lack of any cost for the software itself and no licensing / recurring
license fees.
-- Fred Posner
Sent from mobile
Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733
qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via
sr-users <
sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary
telephony
services whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and
how much stable, secure, efficient and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to
move away
from proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and
technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if
this is not
the place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to
the
sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
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6:58 p.m.
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:40 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would be big $$$!
Given that he said:
"... DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost
an entire rack"
I doubt it.
Moreover, the AWS cost of an instance that large, as you allude, untenable.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
7:26 p.m.
You are right Alex, it is all on premise!
We were offered to move it to cloud, and yes they asked for a lot…
________________________________
From: Alex Balashov via sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 7:58:35 PM
To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org>
Cc: Alex Balashov <abalashov(a)evaristesys.com>
Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other
FOSS SIP software
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:40 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would be big $$$!
Given that he said:
"... DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost
an entire rack"
I doubt it.
Moreover, the AWS cost of an instance that large, as you allude, untenable.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
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7:27 p.m.
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:26 PM, Mahmood Alkhalil
<mahmood.alkhalil(a)outlook.com> wrote:
You are right Alex, it is all on premise!
We were offered to move it to cloud, and yes they asked for a lot…
The economics of public cloud providers depend on oversubscribing physical hardware with
lots of small, and mostly idle instances.
Massive instances break the whole mode, by reserving most or all of the physical hardware
node to themselves. They hate those, and will price them punitively to discourage it.
-- Alex
--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
6:29 p.m.
Hi Mahmood,
I think FOSS often trades licensing/purchase costs for operational costs.
Sure, the software is "free" but because such software is rarely an exact
fit for your use case off the shelf, you have to spend time (money) to:
customize for your operation
integrate into other operational systems - billing, provisioning, support,
etc.
maintaining that expertise over time - either in-house or contracted out,
will cost you $
Fred and Alex have pointed out some additional things on this.
But I think arguments can still be made for FOSS in these areas:
You can control the software, customize it, and are not reliant on a 3rd
party software vendor to keep the software current.
With traditional softswitch vendors like MetaSwitch, Broadsoft, Squire all
putting these products on the back-burner and not
investing in any more development of them, that could be a big
organizational benefit.
The FOSS options are also, at this point in time, more likely to get future
feature development. E.g. Asterisk, FreeSwitch,
Kamailio all support WebRTC and rich media - and the legacy alternatives do
not.
They all help you build highly fault tolerant systems with any number of
architectures to suit your needs.
They can all be made to scale from thousands, to millions of subscribers,
and the legacy alternatives do not.
I would say, IF there is an off-the-shelf, commercially supported system
that suits your needs now and into the future,
and has a cost model that meets your business needs, and supports your
scale, you are almost always better off going with that.
But if the cost model is detached from your needs (nickel and dimed to
death on 'feature licenses'), or, they don't
support features you need, or, you don't think they are going to be further
developed or supported into the future,
or they won't scale the way you need, then, open source gives you the
ability to build your own without having to
reinvent all the wheels.
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 8:52 AM Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users <
sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary
telephony services whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and
how much stable, secure, efficient and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to
move away from proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and
technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if
this is not the place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to
the sender!
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7:19 p.m.
Excellent analysis, Jawaid.
I would add only that, in my opinion, a lot of the argument for open-source related to
control over one's destiny lies in APIs, connectors and integration paths.
There are some value-added telephony services which rely heavily on these, so there is a
lot of pressure on that kind of flexibility, because it's a revenue driver.
On the other hand, for a lot of more vanilla business PBX and POTS replacement services,
these things are relatively unimportant, apart from the obvious need to import/export some
data from billing, provisioning and other backoffice systems. In those cases, the scope of
relatively conventional APIs from established proprietary platforms is likely to be
sufficient, and the case for open-source does not turn much on this question.
-- Alex
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:29 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via
sr-users <sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Mahmood,
I think FOSS often trades licensing/purchase costs for operational costs.
Sure, the software is "free" but because such software is rarely an exact fit
for your use case off the shelf, you have to spend time (money) to:
customize for your operation
integrate into other operational systems - billing, provisioning, support, etc.
maintaining that expertise over time - either in-house or contracted out, will cost you
$
Fred and Alex have pointed out some additional things on this.
But I think arguments can still be made for FOSS in these areas:
You can control the software, customize it, and are not reliant on a 3rd party software
vendor to keep the software current.
With traditional softswitch vendors like MetaSwitch, Broadsoft, Squire all putting these
products on the back-burner and not
investing in any more development of them, that could be a big organizational benefit.
The FOSS options are also, at this point in time, more likely to get future feature
development. E.g. Asterisk, FreeSwitch,
Kamailio all support WebRTC and rich media - and the legacy alternatives do not.
They all help you build highly fault tolerant systems with any number of architectures to
suit your needs.
They can all be made to scale from thousands, to millions of subscribers, and the legacy
alternatives do not.
I would say, IF there is an off-the-shelf, commercially supported system that suits your
needs now and into the future,
and has a cost model that meets your business needs, and supports your scale, you are
almost always better off going with that.
But if the cost model is detached from your needs (nickel and dimed to death on
'feature licenses'), or, they don't
support features you need, or, you don't think they are going to be further developed
or supported into the future,
or they won't scale the way you need, then, open source gives you the ability to
build your own without having to
reinvent all the wheels.
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 8:52 AM Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users
<sr-users(a)lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
Hi Everyone,
I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services
whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient
and cost effective it was.
I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from
proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the
place to ask for such!
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave(a)lists.kamailio.org
Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
__________________________________________________________
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions
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Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender!
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--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800
228
days inactive
228
days old
13 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Alex Balashov -
Fred Posner -
Jawaid Bazyar -
Mahmood Alkhalil