Open source PBX software packages, most notably Asterisk, continue to grow, but mostly in smaller installations. And even though some large-system vendors now are OEMing Asterisk, is open source voice ready for prime time? In this session, you'll learn whether open source PBX software's growing appeal will spread and, eventually, become mainstream within the enterprise. KEY QUESTIONS: * What level of market share and acceptance has open source PBX software attained? What is expected? * Which products use open source PBX software? * What are the most compelling reasons for choosing open source PBX software? What are the greatest areas of concern in making this choice? * Is open source voice feature-comparable with proprietary systems? * What are the technical challenges of an open source PBX deployment, and how are these overcome?
Panelist - Bill Miller, VP, Product Management, Digium
Bill Miller / Vice President, Product Management Bill Miller brings over 20 years of telecommunication experience to his role as vice president of product management. Miller joined Digium in June 2006, heading up both marketing and product management. Today, Miller is responsible for managing Digium's expanding product lines including all hardware, software and appliance families, technology partners and expanding Digium's open source Asterisk Community. Prior to joining Digium, Miller led 3Com's voice product management team where he led voice product line revenue growth while re-positioning the enterprise voice products and driving new strategies for the future. Miller has held senior positions in Product Management, Marketing, Strategic Alliances and Business Development for Andes Networks, Fujitsu Business Communications Systems, General DataComm, Rockwell International and Prime Computer. Miller holds a BS in Computer Engineering Technology from Northeastern University.
Panelist - Kerry Garrison, trixbox Community Director, Fonality
Kerry Garrison is the Community Director for Fonality. In this position he guides the development of the trixbox CE open source telephony project and handles interactions with major vendors as well as the forums. He is the publisher of the popular VOIP blog site VoipSpeak.net and the creator of the video tutorials site asterisktutorials.com. He has been in the IT industry for over 20 years with positions ranging from IT Director of a large multi-site distribution company to developing a large hosted web server platform for a major ISP, to finally running his own IT consulting business in Southern California. Kerry was introduced to the world of Asterisk by a friend and began running his own business on it. After about a year of working with it and writing some articles that became extremely popular on the net, he felt it was time to start putting clients onto Asterisk-based systems. After writing a book on trixbox, he eventually joined the Fonality team in 2006.
Panelist - Martin Steinmann, Leader, Next Generation SMB , Nortel
Martin J. Steinmann has had a successful career in the technology industry for over 20 years as a marketer, technologist, business leader and venture capitalist on two continents. As part of the Vesbridge Partners' team his focus as an investor was mainly concentrated on early stage opportunities and recaps in the enterprise software and IT industry including enterprise productivity software, storage solutions, IT security management, unified communications and voice over IP (VoIP) as well as new media and social networking. Martin is also an accomplished marketer and strategic business leader where he served as vice president of marketing for several technology startup companies. He took operational roles with portfolio companies of Vesbridge Partners initiating and executing strategic company repositioning, management team building, business turn-around, and refinancing and M&A activity. He is also the founder and a member of the board at SIPfoundry, the industry's leading open source community dedicated to VoIP technology and solutions and he gained a lot of experience with open source business models. Prior to joining Vesbridge, Martin was General Partner of Calivia, a strategy consulting and marketing advisory company focused on software startup companies in the telecommunications and IT sectors. Martin also served in various executive roles at Lucent Technologies and at Switzerland based Ascom AG. While at Lucent he was responsible for Lucent's OEM agreement and subsequent acquisition of Yurie Systems Inc., a deal worth more than $1 billion in cash. Martin earned a BSc and MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a PhD in Physics from the Danish Technical University in Copenhagen. During his PhD work he conducted critical research in tunable multi-section DFB/DBR semiconductor lasers, a vital component for today's DWDM optical transmission systems.
Speaker - Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, Nemertes Research
Irwin Lazar is a Principal Analyst & Program Director, Convergence & Collaboration at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, conducts strategic seminars, and advises clients. His background is in network operations, network engineering, voice-data convergence, and IP telephony. Mr. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the enterprise in areas including VOIP, unified communications, and collaboration. Since 1992 Mr. Lazar has been a consultant and analyst, serving a variety of global enterprises and government agencies. Mr. Lazar led efforts to develop security architectures and convergence road-maps, as well as enterprise network architectures, for numerous clients in the health care, pharmaceuticals, banking & finance, energy, government, and retail sectors. Mr. Lazar has led teams of consultants in requirements-gathering and strategy development. He also has evaluated emerging IT trends and analyzed their impact on organizations. A sought-after speaker and author, Mr. Lazar is a columnist for Business Communications Review magazine, provides topics for Network World, and is a frequent resource for the business and trade press. He is regular speaker at events such as Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar holds a bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems from Radford University in Radford, VA, and a Master's of Business Administration (MBA) from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. He served in the U.S. Army Reserve Ordnance Corps as an officer from 1992-2001. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).
Everyone agrees that the largest payoff from migrating to IP Telephony, UC and converged networks will be new applications. But, what applications are actually being developed and deployed? This session will present enterprise technologists who have "walked the walk" of communications-enabled applications; they'll discuss what has worked, what hasn't and why. KEY QUESTIONS * What types of communications-enabled apps can yield significant business benefits when integrated with communications capabilities? * What are the technical challenges to implementing and running these new applications? * How does an enterprise IT organization support function change as these apps come online? * What strategy works best: Relying on internal development teams or external ISVs and other providers?
Marty Parker provides Unified Communications consulting support to both private sector and public sector enterprises. As a Principal of UniComm Consulting and as co-founder of UCStrategies.com, Marty is part of a network of talent and ideas to assure clients of the best and latest information about Unified Communications (UC). Marty's focus is on the applications for UC and how those applications optimize business processes to deliver hard-dollar ROI. This focus is the basis for his BCR Training course, "Planning and Implementing VoIP Unified Communications"; for his articles in BCR Magazine and on NoJitter.com (see "Top UC Applications Now Apparent", June 2007); and for his on-line UC Resources Center available at UCStrategies.com. Marty is a regular moderator and presenter at InterOp, VoiceCon and in other UC industry venues. His applications and industry-oriented perspectives on UC are based on his roles in sales, marketing, product management and executive positions with IBM and ATT/Lucent/Avaya as well as with a major Telecom VAR, and as founder and CEO of venture-funded startups in the early phases of the voice messaging industry.
Rick Tillotson Assistant Information Technology Department Director - Telecommunications Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) www.tasb.org 512.467.0222 rick.tillotson@tasb.org As an IT manager, Rick Tillotson provides innovative networking and telephony technology, procedure and management solutions for the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) headquartered in Austin. Rick and his people make sure that TASB's staff and the technology work together providing exemplary customer service to the public and to the member school boards. Created in 1949, TASB is a voluntary, nonprofit, statewide educational association that serves and represents local Texas school districts. TASB promotes educational excellence for Texas schoolchildren through advocacy, visionary leadership, and high quality services to school districts. With 100% dues paying membership of 1036 Texas school boards and a staff of over 400, TASB has a variety of programs and services including an investment pool, risk management services, an online school policy service, an in-house law firm, an online purchasing co-op, board member education, and governance services. This variety creates a welcome challenge for Rick Tillotson and the rest of the IT division. Rick has often been quoted in the trade press, written numerous articles, and is a frequent speaker and presenter. Accolades include the 1999 International Who's Who of Information Technology, the July 2004 cover story in Communications News, a 2005 Computerworld Honors Laureate and a 2005 Computerworld Honors Program finalist. Rick is a former long time board member and conference chair for FOCUS, the AT&T user group. He was also a long time board member and past-president for JUST-US, the Siemens Communications user group, and just recently was elected back to the board.
Steve is Chief Architect at KITS, a firm that specializes in delivering enterprise level solutions to a variety of industries and verticals including Defense, Government and Public Safety. Steve leads Research and Development at KITS, a unit that focuses on delivering SOA-based products and solution frameworks for commercial markets and includes Unified Communications (UC) efforts. Under his direction, KITS has released RadioConnect for Sametime, a product delivering radio communications into IBM Lotus Sametime, the leading UC platform. With over 20 years of proven information technology leadership, Steve has been responsible for architecting and delivering enterprise solutions to Fortune 1000 companies such as Exxon, Dell, American Express, Sharp Healthcare, IBM, HP, CompUSA and Alcoa.
Speaker - Tony Kaperick, Communications Analyst, INX
Tony Kaperick INX Communications Specialist / Business Analyst Tony is the leading UC communications specialist for INX. With more than 5 years of experience in leading IP telephony/Unified Communications envisioning, planning and deployment processes, Tony brings strong business analyst skills, application integration awareness, and balancing of the user experience with cost-effective support for strategic goals of the organization. Tony draws on such diverse experience as Communications Officer and then Electronics Repair Officer in the US Navy, Peace Corps community development specialist in the jungles of South America, application developer for a community foundation, and program manager for a public sector technology consulting/web application development organization. Presently, Tony focuses on helping more complex organizations through the envisioning, analysis and planning stages of Unified Communications solutions - providing thought leadership around the strategic delivery framework and shaping the INX team's tools, methods and processes for helping our client's realize the successes that unified communications promises.
One of the key opportunities as we move to software-based communications is the potential for application developers to readily and relatively simply build new voice applications and to combine functionalities of existing applications. This may take place in different ways?either via vendor-specific application programming interfaces (APIs), or via standard interfaces such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). This session will examine the different ways of creating new types of voice applications and "mashups," and will help you understand which technical approach may be right for a given situation. * What are SOA's technical elements? How mature are they and the standards? * How widely deployed is SOA today? How extensively is it being used in conjunction with voice systems? * How does SOA differ from an API-based approach? How is each approach likely to be best employed in creating new voice applications? * What are the most important APIs for developers and IT professionals who are interested in voice mashups and communications-enabled applications? * What are some real-world examples of voice mashups and/or communications-enabled apps that leverage APIs and SOA?
Moderator - Dan York, Director of Emerging Technologies, Voxeo
Dan York is Director of Emerging Communication Technology in the Office of the CTO of "Voxeo Corporation":http://www.voxeo.com/ focused on analyzing/evaluating emerging technology, participating in industry standards bodies, addressing VoIP security issues and leading Voxeo's move into "social media" with the deployment of "blogs":http://blogs.voxeo.com/ and podcasts. Since the mid-1980's Dan has been working with online communication technologies and helping businesses and organizations understand how to use and participate in those new media. Along the way, Dan served on the Board of Directors of Linux International and was the President and co-founder of the "Linux Professional Institute":http://www.lpi.org/ (LPI), today the leading global certification program for Linux professionals. He developed "single-source" publishing systems using DocBook XML, assisted in the development of XSLT stylesheets for the Linux Documentation Project and developed several small open source programs as well. Dan moved into the world of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) in 2001 and is today the Best Practices Chair for the "VOIP Security Alliance":http://www.voipsa.org/ as well as the producer of "Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast":http://www.blueboxpodcast.com/ where since October 2005 each week he and co-host Jonathan Zar discuss VOIP security news and interview people involved in the field. A dynamic speaker with over 25 years in information technology, Dan routinely presents at conferences, has authored multiple books on Linux and networking and has written numerous articles in print and online. His writing can be found online at "Disruptive Telephony":http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/ , "Disruptive Conversations":http://www.disruptiveconversations.com/ and "Voxeo's weblogs":http://blogs.voxeo.com/ . More information about Dan can also be found on his home site of "www.danyork.com":http://www.danyork.com
Crick Waters Co-founder, EVP Strategy and Business Development Ribbit Corporation Crick co-founded Ribbit on the simple premise that voice has value, and that value is in the application of voice. Where the convergence of computers and telephony has been ongoing for some years - the fusion of voice, computers, and applications is the new "value frontier" for telephony. Crick leads Ribbit's strategy and business development bringing the new frontier of voice-enabled applications to developer, enterprise, and carrier markets. Prior to starting Ribbit, Crick lead development and delivery of consumer voice and data services including fiber-to-the-home, VoIP, DSL, Wi-Fi, and voice over DSL services for AT&T Consumer Services. Crick was Director of Value Added Services at NorthPoint Communications where he was responsible for creating services delivered over the company's high speed data network. During his tenure, he launched one of the Nation's first voice over DSL services. Prior to NorthPoint, Crick was Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Applied Process Technology, a Silicon Valley company, where he brought this company's innovation in water treatment technology to market. Crick has also held leadership positions at three separate divisions of International Paper in technology management, process and product development, and business management. Prior to his civilian life, Crick devoted seven years to developing nuclear reactor instrumentation and control technology for the U.S. Navy's submarine, the U.S.S. Seawolf. Crick has served on the Boards of Directors of the DSL Forum and the International Packet Communications Consortium. He has B.S.E.E and M.B.A degrees from Duke University, and a M.S. in Nuclear Engineering.
Shantanu Sarkar Manager - Engineering Voice Technology Group / CTO Cisco ssarkar@cisco.com 408 902 3466 Shantanu Sarkar is involved with Technology Strategy and Business Development for Cisco Unified Communications and mobility. A 12-year Cisco veteran, Shantanu has been involved in Enterprise VoIP from its earliest days, including the first VoIP call from space. Shantanu's contributions in voice include signaling, collaboration, endpoints and applications. Previously, Shantanu has led engineering teams at Hughes Network Systems, Motorola and Digital Equipment Corporation. Shantanu holds a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and a Masters degree in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University. He is also the author of 24 patents in VoIP and associated areas.
We've heard a lot about the concept of the "mobile enterprise," but what's the reality? In this session, IT/telecom executives from enterprises that have made a major commitment to mobility and wireless communication describe what they've done, why they made the decisions they made and what have been the lessons learned. KEY QUESTIONS: * What caused these organizations to become early adopters? * What have they learned about the benefits and limitations of mobility? * What are the challenges to managing and maintaining a network of mobile devices - and people? * Are they satisfied with their mobility solutions and what difficulties do they wrestle with? * Will they stay with their existing mobility solution or migrate to WiMAX, LTE, or some other mobile service in the future?
Michael Finneran is an independent consultant and industry analyst specializing in wireless technologies, mobile unified communications, and fixed-mobile convergence. With over 30-years in the networking and wide range of experience, he is a widely recognized expert in the field. He has recently published his first book titled "Voice Over Wireless LANs- The Complete Guide" (Elsevier, 2008), though his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Michael has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon and InterOp; he now serves as the program chair for Wireless and Mobility at VoiceCon. In the consulting area, Mr. Finneran has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. For twenty-three years he wrote the Networking Intelligence column for Business Communications Review. He now contributes on wireless and mobility to NoJitter as well as UC Strategies. He has published numerous articles and white papers and has contributed to Computerworld, Data Communications, The Ticker, and The ACUTA Journal. A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree in Marketing and Management Information Systems from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Speaker - Greg Ireland, Executive Officer, Thirteenth District Court, New Mexico
Gregory Ireland is the Executive Officer of the Thirteenth Judicial District Court in Los Lunas,(Albuquerque) New Mexico. He holds two masters degrees in administration from the University of Denver, College of Law. He has been an executive officer of general and appellate jurisdiction courts in both urban and rural areas since 1984. He has been recognized to speak nationwide and has often coached court organizations in subjects such as caseflow management, electronic document filing, and best practices for litigants who represent themselves in court proceedings. He has been influential in helping courts to adopt technology standards such as "Courtroom 21." Numerous articles concerning the use of advanced technology in the courts he supervises have appeared in diverse publications such as Pro AV magazine.
Renee Behr, Messaging Engineer, Holland & Knight Renee is currently an integral part of the Holland & Knight Messaging team responsible for architecture and implementation of services spanning the full spectrum of messaging and Unified Communications. She has been in IT for over 8 years performing roles ranging from hardware support to software development and from systems administration to messaging engineering. Renee has performed numerous upgrades, infrastructure conversions and new technology implementations and has worked with messaging from Exchange 5 through Exchange 2007
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