The conference agenda delivers four days of valuable, in-depth technical content with multiple educational offerings, including:
Workshops: 3-hour tutorials of in-depth, detailed information/instruction on technologies, market and management issues.
Deep Dives: 2-hour sessions combining in-depth instruction with panel discussions on emerging technology and market issues.
Breakouts: 45-60-minute panels, discussion and presentations/demos by experts on key industry topics.
Coffee Talk: Peer exchange and informal discussion on a wide-range of topics.
In this video (right), watch Eric Krapf, the co-chair of VoiceCon San Francisco 2009, explains what's new in the conference program and what some of the key sessions and speakers will be in November.
What mobility issues are most critical for your enterprise: Integrating PBXs with cellular devices? Standardizing on a single type of end-user mobile device? Controlling cellular costs and negotiating better deals with the carriers? To start off the show, we'll gather to assess the state of mobility in the enterprise, and answer some questions about how to advance mobility and begin integrating it with Unified Communications.
Michael Finneran, Principal of dBrn Associates, Inc. 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 field, his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Mr. Finneran has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon, InterOp, and the Mobile Business Expo. In the consulting area, he has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. A long time columnist for Business Communications Review, he now contributes regularly to NoJitter and UC Strategies. Well respected as an educator, Mr. Finneran has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His programs are offered through Telecom+UC Training. A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
When voice is embedded in other applications and running across a network with other types of traffic, how do you identify problems with voice quality and availability—and fix them as quickly as possible? This session will provide an update on the latest tools and technologies for troubleshooting converged networks—how and when to perform root-cause analysis, how to measure, monitor and manage voice quality on an ongoing basis, and how to use the data generated by monitoring and management systems to get an overall picture of the network's health, and the voice application's behavior. KEY QUESTIONS: * How do you identify and troubleshoot VoIP problems? * How do you configure your network management system to monitor key network factors that impact VoIP? * What are the metrics of factors that adversely impact VoIP. * What tools are available for performing root-cause analysis on problems that occur with voice traffic running on an IP network? * How do the various IT management teams share information and reports so as to expedite troubleshooting? * If your enterprise is deploying more video, do you need troubleshooting systems for this traffic as well? If so, what metrics and tools are required to troubleshoot this traffic?
Speaker - Ron Trunk, Sr. Consultant, Chesapeake NetCraftsmen, LLC
Ron Trunk is a highly experienced network architect and consultant with an in-depth background in network infrastructure architecture design, specializing in security architecture and implementation.??Ron applies his security architectural experience to a wide variety of complex large scale networks and technologies including wireless, remote access, converged voice, video and data networks.? He has designed complex multimedia networks for both government and commercial clients. Ron has published several articles on network security and troubleshooting, and has served as a technical editor for books on other networking topics. He is currently involved in developing and promoting the Cisco Mid-Atlantic User's Group, serving the greater Washington-Baltimore area. Ron is CCIE #5942 and holds a CISSP certification.
Enterprises continue to grapple with implementing Quality of Service (QOS), especially for real-time applications over the wide area. And just as important is the less tangible concern that's come to be known as Quality of Experience. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that, while voice is the most demanding application, and usually the most important, it must run alongside other applications that, at least some of the time, might require even higher priority. In this session, you'll learn how to gain a holistic view of the application traffic that traverses your distributed networks, and how to balance the tradeoffs when a network is running voice, video, and data applications that may require varying levels of priority at different times. KEY QUESTIONS: * What's the best way to guarantee that real-time multimedia traffic will get the treatment it requires in order to sound best—especially when traversing the WAN? * What are the concrete metrics you should use to determine whether your end users are actually getting acceptable-quality voice? * How is QOE defined, and how do you measure compliance with QOE thresholds? * Will voice continue to receive exclusive treatment as the highest QOS-priority application, even if video becomes more widely deployed and frequently used? * How do you configure, measure and monitor application usage on a wide area link? Can WAN links vary application priorities dynamically, and across network boundaries?
Loki Jorgenson is the Chief Scientist at Apparent Networks. In addition to providing thought leadership on range of networking and connectivity topics, Loki is responsible for planning and managing the Company's product research efforts. In this role, he guides and manages the Apparent Networks research team while also looking ?over the horizon' at various advanced and next-generation technologies. Loki earned a Ph.D. from McGill University where he specialized in statistical mechanics and computational physics. Since the early 1990's, Loki has been involved in a diverse range of network-based research, including high performance computing and grid networks, collaborative and distance learning, distributed interactivity, scientific visualization and algorithms development. He is often a featured speaker at networking industry conferences and academic symposiums, and regularly publishes articles in industry trade publications and academic journals. Having joined the Company in its early days, Loki directed the focus on expert systems, application modeling, network diagnostics, and packet behavior analysis. The results of his work have informed critical product development decisions at Apparent Networks in VoIP, video, application performance, and automated network management.
Dr. J. Chris Lauwers, Chief Technology Officer Lauwers has been Avistar's CTO since February 2000. He was the company's vice president of engineering for five years before that. Before joining Avistar, he was principal software architect at Vicor, Inc. He also served as a research associate at Olivetti Research Center. Lauwers holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven of Belgium. He also holds an M.S. and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford University.
Dr Mike Hollier is a technical and commercial pioneer in perceptual engineering. Between 1990 and 1999 he directed BT's research into audio, video and multi-media performance assessment. His PhD was gained from the University of Essex for his work on using models of human hearing to predict speech quality; contributing to the ITU-T PESQ standard. During 2000 Mike lead the incubation of Psytechnics Ltd and left BT to become the CEO. While CEO he managed the company's formation and early growth, raising further VC finance during the technology sector crash. This feat attracted a National Business Award in October 2002. Since October 2002 Mike has been the CTO acting as a market evangelist, working on business development and overseeing the R&D of a new generation of voice and video products. Product innovations embrace the latest IPT/VoIP solutions, video-conferencing and fixed-mobile-convergence to dovetail with the evolution of unified communications in the workplace. Dr Hollier is a Chartered Engineer, twice winner of the Alan Rudge Award for Innovation, a fellow of the University of Essex and member of the AES.
John Bartlett John Bartlett is a leading authority on real-time traffic, application performance and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. He specializes in helping enterprises manage voice, video and data application performance. Recent work has focused on designing global networks to best support video conferencing and telepresence systems. John has 32 years of experience in the semiconductor, computer and communications fields in marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing and consulting roles. He has contributed to microprocessor, computer and network equipment design for over 40 products. He has been consulting since 1996. Prior to working as a consultant, John was a founder and VP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Agile Networks, now part of Lucent Technologies. Under his leadership, the company designed and built a high performance Ethernet switch implementing VLANs, and one of the first commercial ATM switches. Both products were successfully introduced to the market and the firm became profitable before it was acquired. Mr. Bartlett also served on the IEEE 802.1 committee during this period, and contributed to the development of the IEEE 802.1P and IEEE 802.1Q standards (priority and VLANs.) John is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, where he received the Dartmouth Society of Engineers Annual Prize for the quality of his thesis presentation. John is co-owner of a patent in shared memory multiprocessor design.
Implementing Unified Communications (UC) is much different than implementing IP Telephony (IPT). Almost all UC solutions emphasize multiple signaling protocols and media streams including Presence, IM, e-mail, web conferencing, and directory-based click-to-communicate, all integrated into new desktop and mobile UC client interfaces. Moreover, many UC solutions can be implemented without purchasing and installing a new IP-PBX with IP phones for all users. This session will address these important differences by providing an overview of UC implementation alternatives, with reasons for each type, and will then address specific implementation requirements for two versions of UC: * UC as an upgrade to an existing or new IP-PBX (Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, et al.) * UC as an upgrade to an existing or new desktop environment (Microsoft, IBM, et al.) This deep dive session will focus on the bill of materials, network design, bandwidth requirements, security/access management, and the specific technical steps and scope of work required for: (1) Basic UC deployment (IM, click-to-communicate); (2) UC Mobility deployment (mobile devices and remote desktop); and (3) UC Conferencing deployment (beginning with Voice and expanding to web and video conferencing with collaborative workspace integrations). You will come away with an understanding of the steps required to effectively implement a UC system and UC-enabled applications, with reference materials and templates that can be applied in your own environment. KEY QUESTIONS: * What specific additional components do I need to implement UC for my company? * What changes are needed to our PBX, LAN, WAN or carrier configurations and bandwidth? * How do I link UC to our business applications (e-mail, workspaces, ERP/CRM/SCP/etc.) to get ROI? * What are the implementation steps and what professional services will we need? * What issues will we face with access, security and reliability and how are those managed? * What questions do we need to ask the vendors when purchasing a UC solution? Marty Parker will be joined in the session by other founding members of UCStrategies.com.
Moderator/Speaker - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI. Marty is co-founder of UniComm Consulting, the industry's premier independent consulting firm providing strategy, planning and implementation support for enterprises in all industry segments. Marty is also co-founder of UCStrategies.com, the industry's leading forum for UC information and dialog. Marty created the workshop, Planning and Implementing Unified Communications, offered though BCR Training since 2006 and now available through Telecom + UC Training. Involved providing UC sessions at VoiceCon since 2006, Marty will be delivering the industry review, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" as well as leading the deep-dive session, "Unified Communications Implementation." As a student of UC successes and case studies, Marty will moderate the important session, "Communications Enabled Apps in Action: Case Studies" at which customer executives will highlight their actual UC experiences. Marty bases is UC activities on his experience in sales, strategic planning, product line management, financial management and general management positions in both computing (IBM) and communications (ATT/Lucent/Avaya) firms, as well as with two venture funded firms and with a very large west-coast telecom interconnect firm in the 1980s.
The range of options for smart mobile devices continues to expand as do the choices for the underlying operating systems. In the consumer space, the device decision comes down to which option offers the best experience for the applications the users value most, and solutions like Apple's iPhone offer over 50,000 choices. However in the enterprise environment we also have to grapple with issues of security, device management, and a development environment that will support organizational objectives to mobilize line of business applications. Further, with the move to unified communications, the mobile device will be doing more than just voice and push email. RIM, Apple, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, WebOS, and LiMO are all vying for a slice of the pie, and users face a daunting decision about which environment(s) they should embrace. In this session we will review the major issues that will factor into that decision and then hear from vendors and users who have a hand in making this vision a reality, and we'll look to determine if there is truly one mobile device environment that can serve the full range of enterprise requirements. KEY QUESTIONS * Which wireless devices are best suited for supporting enterprise UC, and—perhaps more importantly—which devices have your users already chosen? * If we do support multiple operating system environments, how will that impact application development and support costs? * How important is it that the mobile device be integrated with the overall UC solution, what functions are most important to mobilize, and which UC platforms will be most important to support. * Should we develop mobile applications that are O/S specific or is it better to host the application on a server and simply use a mobile browser? * How do we handle user requests for non-supported devices? * Is it possible to effectively manage user-owned devices ("I want my iPhone/Pre/whatever")? * Can a solution that utilizes both Wi-Fi and cellular be implemented if those two technologies are managed by different groups? Who should be in charge? * Will the combination of Google Voice and Android make Google a real option for the enterprise and how soon?
Panelist - Thomas Behnke, Global Network Services Manager and Architect, Kraft Foods
Tom Behnke is the Manager of Global Managed Network Services Architecture and Strategy for Kraft Foods, one of the largest food and beverage companies in the world. Tom is responsible for the development of the Kraft Foods voice and data communication strategy and provides business process outsourcing oversight. In addition, Tom is one of the company's foremost leaders in enterprise transformation and has demonstrated significant experience in leading initiatives designed to further the use of technology as a means of increasing business efficiencies. Currently, Tom is working on the development and implementation of Kraft's latest "Office of the Future" Initiative. This latest initiative combines un-assigned seating in an open workspace with enhanced unified communications capabilities in order to untether Kraft Foods employees while providing them with the flexibility to determine which tools they use to improve their productivity and reduce operating expenses. Tom holds a MBA from Lake Forest Graduate School of Management and a B.S. in Physics from Loyola University Chicago.
Panelist - John Cash, Enterprise Voice Advocate, Platform Product Management Group, RIM
John Cash is an Enterprise Voice Advocate based in Dallas, TX. Mr. Cash has over 18 years of sales and enterprise IT leadership experience spanning multiple industry segments including manufacturing, financial services and government/military. Immediately prior to joining RIM, Mr. Cash worked for Nokia, overseeing early market sales of Nokia's enterprise voice and mobility solution for the U.S. Other previous career assignments were with Capital One and Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Mr. Cash has a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Virginia and an MBA from Liberty University.
Jerry McNerney is responsible for Motorola's Mobile Computing portfolio for the Enterprise Mobility Solutions division. He takes this role after successfully leading Strategy & Business Development for the Enterprise business and managing the transportation, distribution and logistics industry markets globally for Motorola and the former Symbol Technologies. Before joining Motorola, Jerry was with AMR Research where he was the Senior Analyst, Supply Chain Service. Prior experience included sales, marketing, and operations managerial positions with international transportation carriers specializing in perishable food, bulk and automobile carriage. Jerry speaks frequently at industry trade conferences, user group meetings, and executive conferences. He has appeared on CNBC and CNN and is widely quoted in leading business and industry trade publications on the benefits of mobility in the enterprise. Jerry received his B.S. degree from the State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler and M.B.A. degree from St. John's University.
Michael Finneran, Principal of dBrn Associates, Inc. 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 field, his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Mr. Finneran has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon, InterOp, and the Mobile Business Expo. In the consulting area, he has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. A long time columnist for Business Communications Review, he now contributes regularly to NoJitter and UC Strategies. Well respected as an educator, Mr. Finneran has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His programs are offered through Telecom+UC Training. A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
As enterprise communications moves from the legacy PBX-centric architecture to one based on IP networking and software applications, the architectures supporting these systems will also change. Enterprises have the opportunity to integrate communications systems more tightly into their corporate datacenters, taking advantage of Web Services, server virtualization and cloud computing, among other technology trends. So how should enterprises plan to take advantage of these trends, and what pitfalls await them as they do? And how will technology vendors attempt to leverage these trends in their own product or services offerings? In this VoiceCon Summit, CTOs and other technology leaders from vendor organizations will discuss and debate the various approaches to next-gen communications architectures. You'll leave with a better understanding of how your enterprise's communications systems will fit into the larger information technology environment, and how these new architectures will support end users to provide higher productivity and great business benefits.
Panelist - Adrian Brookes, VP, Office of CTO, Unified Communications Technical Vision & Strategy, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Adrian has over 20 years of experience in the information and communications technology sector, having worked at many of the leading manufacturers. Adrian's current role at Siemens as part of the Office of the CTO is to provide the strategy and vision for Siemens UC customers globally. Adrian manages a small team with Global responsibility ensuring that SEN products and solutions incorporate the newest technologies for the benefit of our customers. Adrian has recently worked on 'Cloud' deployments as well as Social Networking integration into the SEN portfolio,
Panelist - Pat Galvin, CTO UC Software, IBM Software Group
Pat Galvin joined IBM in 1998 as part of the original Sametime team. He is now the lead architect for Sametime, and has contributed to every release along the way. He is also a leading evangelist for the use of SIP within IBM, and he lead the team that extended the WebSphere Application Server to support the development of SIP-based applications. Most recently he is heading up the team that's building Sametime Unified Telephony, an add-on that will seamlessly integrate Sametime with the enterprise telephone system.
Panelist - Joe Burton, VP/CTO, Voice Technology Group, Cisco
Joe Burton is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in Cisco's Voice Technology Group. His team is responsible for vision, technical strategy and advanced research for Unified Communications at Cisco. Unified Communications is suite of Internet Protocol (IP) voice, data and video products and applications designed to help organizations of all sizes streamline business processes and work more efficiently. Additionally, he and his team represent Cisco in many Unified Communications industry standards organizations, and represent the Cisco Unified Communications team in many cross-Cisco initiatives. Joe is a highly regarded visionary in our industry and an evangelist for Cisco. He has a passion for technology and innovation, as well as a demonstrated business savvy that has been instrumental in several of our acquisitions including Latitude, WebEx, and Securent. During his career at Cisco, Joe has led the development of many of Cisco's Unified Communications products including MeetingPlace voice, video, and data conferencing products, IPVC video conferencing, IP Communicator, Unified Advantage, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, productivity application integrations, and Cisco Unity Connection integrated voice messaging products.
Panelist - Lawrence Byrd, Director, Unified Communication Architecture, Avaya
Lawrence Byrd is Director of Unified Communications Architecture and helps drive the definition and communication of Avaya's intelligent communications strategy. Lawrence has eighteen years of communications, CRM and contact center experience and thirty years of advanced software and Internet experience. Lawrence was co-founder of Quintus Corporation in 1984 where he held executive positions in software development, marketing and strategy. Quintus was a leading provider of multimedia contact center software that was acquired by Avaya in 2001. Lawrence has a BA in Philosophy from Durham, England, was a research associate in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now lives with his family in California.
Moderator - Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, leads Yankee Group's Global Enterprise and Consumer Research Kerravala's team analyzes the impact of connectivity transformation on the Anywhere Consumer and the Anywhere Enterprise, and probes the changes to behaviors, motivations and technologies that result. Kerravala manages the research and consulting agenda that enables clients to meet the demands of the global connectivity revolution. Kerravala's expertise involves working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading infrastructure consulting firm. Earlier, he was the vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic brokerage firm, deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, where he was responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Kerravala holds a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Moderator - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
Many industry analysts (and some vendors) are asserting that the desk phone is, if not dead, at least past its prime. They argue that there's no cost justification for putting a hard phone on every desk, claiming a PC-based softphone is an adequate substitute for at least a significant portion of the user base. Those on the other side of this debate argue that PCs are prone to unpredictable problems and crashes, that they're not always on, and that softphones provide lower voice quality and security. So who's right? In this Summit, a panel of experts will debate the issues and let you decide.
Panelist - Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group
Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
Panelist - Dave Michels, Blogger, NoJitter/PinDropSoup
Panelist - Stephen Leaden, President, Leaden Associates, Inc.
Stephen Leaden is founder and President of Leaden Associates, Inc., an independent Telecommunications IT consulting firm providing specialized support in Telecommunications technologies and ROI strategies. Mr. Leaden has been in the Telecommunications field over 25 years, with 18 of those with his own firm. Clients include recognized enterprise clients in healthcare/education, manufacturing, financial services, publishing, and government vertical market segments. Mr. Leaden's firm focuses as an extension of IT staff to facilitate the design, procurement, project implementation, and outsourcing for converged voice and data solutions. During their engagement, Leaden Associates proactively adds value via ROI strategies integrated into the projects they serve on. Mr. Leaden's practice has focused on Voice over IP and key market trends in this area - he has spoken at national and International conferences on VoIP, has written several papers on VoIP strategies, troubleshooting and security, and has been quoted in national industry publications including NoJitter, BCR Magazine, Computer World, Information Week, and the Washington Post among others. Mr. Leaden is on the faculty of Telecom+UC Training (a spin-off of BCR Training) and teaches two courses: "Cost Control of Wired and Wireless Networks: Best Practices and "Optimizing Enterprise Networks".
Reactor Panelist - Steve Hardy, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Avaya
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
The recession economy has taken its toll on market demand for enterprise communications systems and solutions. It may be bad time for suppliers, but a good time for buyers who can enjoy lower prices, increased system performance, and no/low interest financing as buying incentives. The crowded competitive field is preparing for the next OCS release from Microsoft that is likely to affect major market equilibrium changes while more than a few long time system suppliers, such as Nortel, struggle to survive. In addition, the trends towards cloud-based computing and greater reliance on mobile communications each threaten to bring a new paradigm shift in the way enterprises communicate internally and externally. This session will include updated telephony system market forecasts and supplier share estimates; a discussion of which enterprise communications system features and applications are hot (selling) or cold (stagnating); a review of major market trends, such as cloud computing, hosted solutions, and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC); and a critical analysis of the leading system suppliers and their flagship offerings. KEY QUESTIONS * What is the future direction of the enterprise communications market and how is it changing from a product and supplier perspective? *Will Cisco extend its reign as the current market leader and can Microsoft follow in its footsteps? What is the future of IBM (the Microsoft-alternative) as an enterprise telephony system competitor? * Will cloud-based solutions from new competitors, such as Google and Amazon, replace the need for enterprise hardware equipment and software? * How are the traditional system suppliers adjusting to changing market conditions and who may not be around when the smoke clears? * Are customers actually buying and implementing SIP and Unified Communications offerings or is it still all hype? * When will intelligent mobile communications devices obsolete desktop telephone instruments? SPEAKER: Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
Speaker - Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group
Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
The demise of the desk phone has been predicted for several years now, but is there any evidence of a decline? Has the economic downturn brought a reassessment of the 30-40% of a new system spend that's devoted to desktop instruments? What's the case for deploying a desk phone to non-customer-facing employees? In this session, we'll debate whether budget cuts should finally force enterprises to revisit the expense of desk phones. We'll also consider the features and functions that are most appealing in desk phones in this environment. KEY QUESTIONS: * With some vendors bundling UC functionality with IP-PBXs, is it worthwhile to forgo hard phones altogether? * What is the price/performance of the latest phone sets? Are vendors cutting prices to stimulate continued demand? What are the life cycle expectations for hard phones? * Will the cost of vendor-proprietary desk phones drive increased adoption of: SIP phones? Softphones? Mobility features in call control platforms? * What quality and security challenges need to be overcome before softphones/UC portals go more mainstream?
Speaker - Stephen Leaden, President, Leaden Associates, Inc.
Stephen Leaden is founder and President of Leaden Associates, Inc., an independent Telecommunications IT consulting firm providing specialized support in Telecommunications technologies and ROI strategies. Mr. Leaden has been in the Telecommunications field over 25 years, with 18 of those with his own firm. Clients include recognized enterprise clients in healthcare/education, manufacturing, financial services, publishing, and government vertical market segments. Mr. Leaden's firm focuses as an extension of IT staff to facilitate the design, procurement, project implementation, and outsourcing for converged voice and data solutions. During their engagement, Leaden Associates proactively adds value via ROI strategies integrated into the projects they serve on. Mr. Leaden's practice has focused on Voice over IP and key market trends in this area - he has spoken at national and International conferences on VoIP, has written several papers on VoIP strategies, troubleshooting and security, and has been quoted in national industry publications including NoJitter, BCR Magazine, Computer World, Information Week, and the Washington Post among others. Mr. Leaden is on the faculty of Telecom+UC Training (a spin-off of BCR Training) and teaches two courses: "Cost Control of Wired and Wireless Networks: Best Practices and "Optimizing Enterprise Networks".
Patrick is Sr. Director of Product Management at Polycom and is responsible for driving the evolution of VoIP phones today to the UC endpoints of tomorrow. Patrick has been in the IP communications industry for over 10 years with recent past experience as VP of Product Management and co-founder of Zultys Technologies. Patrick has also held senior technical roles at CopperCom and Spirent Communications and holds a BSEE degree from Purdue University.
Reactor Panelist - Lawrence Byrd, Director, Unified Communication Architecture, Avaya
Lawrence Byrd is Director of Unified Communications Architecture and helps drive the definition and communication of Avaya's intelligent communications strategy. Lawrence has eighteen years of communications, CRM and contact center experience and thirty years of advanced software and Internet experience. Lawrence was co-founder of Quintus Corporation in 1984 where he held executive positions in software development, marketing and strategy. Quintus was a leading provider of multimedia contact center software that was acquired by Avaya in 2001. Lawrence has a BA in Philosophy from Durham, England, was a research associate in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now lives with his family in California.
Reactor Panelist - Mike Storella, Director, Business Development, the Americas, snom Technology
Legacy PBX systems are being retired and new functionality is essentially only available with IP-based systems. Enterprises are not faced with the question of whether to migrate to Voice over IP (VoIP) and IP Telephony (IPT), it's a question of when. And the emerging capabilities for Unified Communications (UC) increase the complexity this transition. Despite the growth of these technologies, many enterprises have limited experience with IP Telephony and VoIP, and once the decision to migrate is made, there are a host of tough challenges to face - from inventorying the readiness of LANs and wiring closets, to WAN performance, IT organizational and staffing issues, security, utility costs and software support, patching and version control. This tutorial analyzes these issues with recommended actions and best practices that will lead to successful VoIP/IPT/UC deployments. It cuts through the hype to the real advantages and presents how VoIP/IPT and UC work and how they operate. This session will also guide the attendee through the rest of the VoiceCon conference with suggested sessions, exhibits and other resources that will make the conference attendance experience as valuable as possible. Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks, and VoIP and IP converged networks all around the world, and he advises venture capital and investment bankers in communications technologies.
Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
We live in a multi-vendor world; companies that sole source their communications equipment are the exception, not the norm. While most companies want to deliver a consistent set of unified communications capabilities to all users, interoperable UC solutions from IP-PBX vendors are tough - if not impossible - to find. That explains much of the appeal of Microsoft and IBM, whose unified communications solutions interface with a variety of third-party telephony solutions. This tutorial is designed to help company CXOs/decision makers, IT and communications managers and technicians gain a good understanding of the architecture and functionality of both Microsoft Office Communications Server Release 2 (OCS R2) and IBM Lotus Sametime. Attendees will gain key insights into the significant differences in how IBM and Microsoft approach the UC market, where their solutions are similar and where they diverge. The tutorial covers telephony call-control capabilities within Sametime Unified Telephony and Office Communications Server R2, describing the unique mechanisms each uses for integrating with telephony systems from multiple vendors. You will leave this tutorial with a thorough overview of Microsoft Office Communications Server, IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 and Sametime Unified Telephony, and the foundation necessary for pursuing either or both of these products as part of your enterprise unified communications solution. Brent Kelly has written numerous articles and reports on Unified Communications, focusing on Microsoft, IBM, and telephony vendors layering UC solutions on top of their PBXs. He has spoken and taught seminars on Unified Communications and on implementing IP Rich Media Communications in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He leads the Unified Communications practice group at Wainhouse Research.
Brent Kelly has written numerous articles and reports on Unified Communications, focusing on Microsoft, IBM, and telephony vendors layering UC solutions on top of their PBXs. He has spoken and taught seminars on Unified Communications and on implementing IP Rich Media Communications in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He leads the Unified Communications practice group at Wainhouse Research.
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This tutorial explains what SIP is, how it works, what the major issues for SIP deployments are, and how SIP will evolve in the future. The session focuses on the technical aspects of SIP and how it is used. It analyzes in detail the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing and connecting SIP across the PSTN. You will learn about SIP extensions and how SIMPLE works for IM/presence. The tutorial also examines some of the challenges SIP faces, including NAT traversal (and the tools developed to cope with it: STUN, TURN and ICE) and security. The tutorial concludes with an assessment of how SIP may evolve and its role in peer-to-peer environments. You will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers and organizations.
Unified Communications presents such an array of technology requirements and demands, often with unproven payback, that many enterprises are considering outsourcing UC, at least until demand reaches critical mass within the enterprise user base and until standards and implementation best practices are more settled. The question is, what UC applications and functions are available in either managed or hosted offerings, and how should you decide whether it's worthwhile to go this route? In this session, we'll look at specific managed and hosted UC offerings; you'll come away with a better idea of what's available, whether it's cost justified, and what competitive advantage your business might be able to gain by moving quickly to implement these UC apps via a managed or hosted offering. KEY QUESTIONS: * What carriers, systems integrators or other service providers are currently offering UC as a managed or hosted service? * What will different UC capabilities cost as a managed or hosted service, and what's the business case for adopting these? * What integration efforts are required to make managed/hosted UC work with the communications functions that you keep in house? * What are the pitfalls of going with a managed/hosted offering? * How do you mesh new managed/hosted UC services with other managed services you may have for WAN equipment, security or other functions already under contract to a service provider? What vendor lock-in scenarios are likely? * If you implement a managed or hosted UC service to get a UC capability up and running quickly, how easy or difficult will it be to move that capability in house later?
Speaker - Melanie Turek, Industry Principal, Frost & Sullivan
Melanie Turek is an Industry Principal at Frost & Sullivan. She is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. She also has in-depth experience with business-process engineering, project management, compliance, and productivity & performance enhancement, as well as a wide range of software technologies including messaging, ERP, CRM and contact center applications. Ms. Turek writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events, including VoiceCon, Interop and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, for which she has served as an advisory board member and track chair. Prior to working at Frost & Sullivan, Ms. Turek was a Senior Vice-President and Founding Partner at Nemertes Research. She also spent 10 years in various senior editorial roles at Information Week magazine. Ms. Turek graduated cum laude with a BA in Anthropology from Harvard College. She currently works from her home office in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
Panelist - Alla Reznik, Director, Global Advanced Voice Services, Verizon
Alla Reznik is a director of product management of global advanced voice services for Verizon. In this position, she leads marketing and strategic positioning of the company's global Voice over IP (VoIP) and contact center services. Ms. Reznik has more than a decade of experience in the telecommunications field. She began her career with Verizon Business (formerly MCI) in 1997, leading product marketing and development efforts for ISDN, Access, DSL, Secure Gateway, IP VPN, Private Line and Optical services and, most recently, Ethernet, IP and VPLS. Before joining MCI, Ms. Reznik worked at AT&T International in Washington, DC in the capacity of Business Development manager where she promoted AT&T's business with foreign governments. Prior to starting her career in telecommunications, Ms. Reznik worked at the World Bank.
Panelist - Steve Schilling, President & CEO, Cypress Communications
Stephen L. Schilling has over 20 years of experience in the telecom and data communications industry where he has specialized in turnarounds, start-ups and managing high-growth firms. Prior to Cypress Communications, Mr. Schilling was the founder and President of Netifice Communications, a company he created in 1998 and lead until its merger with MegaPath Networks. Under his leadership, Netifice navigated the turbulent waters of telecom in the early 2000's to become a thriving, nationally recognized leader and innovator in the IP VPN space. Before creating Netifice, Mr. Schilling was President and COO of Charter Communications International, and prior to Charter Communications, he held executive positions at GE Capital-ResCom, MFS and RealCom Office Communications. Mr. Schilling has twice been named to Catalyst Magazine's Atlanta's Top 50 Entrepreneurs list. In 2000 he was an Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year finalist and in 2004 he was awarded Atlanta Telecom Professionals' Award for Outstanding Leadership. Mr. Schilling speaks frequently at industry tradeshows and has been published in various trade journals. He earned a B.S. in Administrative Management from Clemson University and an M.B.A. in International Business from Georgia State University.
Panelist - John Trimmer, CEO, CallTower
Panelist - Marisa Viveros, VP Converged Communications and Mobility, IBM Global Technology
Panelist - Ross Sedgewick, Director, Strategy, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Ross Sedgewick serves as Director, Strategic Marketing at Siemens Enterprise Communications, leveraging over 20 years of management experience in the Enterprise Software, Telecom, CRM, Channel Management and Solution Marketing arenas. Ross has responsibility for the Strategic Marketing and Global Analyst Relations teams, which drives positioning and messaging for SEN's solution portfolios worldwide. Prior to working at Siemens, he acquired broad industry experience in senior positions with companies such as IBM Corporation and Delano Technologies. Ross holds a Honors Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto, and an MBA (Marketing) from the Schulich School of Business at York University.
Presence is the heart of unified communications and, some would argue, of all next-generation enterprise communications. But presence loses much of its value if it's implemented within discrete systems that can't exchange information with each other - between different systems within an enterprise, between partner companies, with customers, and between public and private networks. In addition to exchange issues, there are important trends in providing richer presence content, automating status, and in the development of rules and policy engines that govern who is accessible to whom and under what conditions. This session will explore these topics and examine progress on these important functionality issues. KEY QUESTIONS: * What "rich presence" capabilities will we see, and how will they help UC applications deployment? * What are the issues in inter- and intra-enterprise presence aggregation and federation, and how far have we progressed in solving them? * Will setting presence status require less manual intervention in the future? * What is the role of rules and policy engines, and where are we in their development? * Are current presence systems future-proofed so that they can adopt federation solutions when these become available?
Moderator/Speaker - Don Van Doren, Principal, UniComm Consulting, LLC
Don Van Doren has worked for most of his professional career as a systems developer and consultant applying innovative technologies, systems, and processes to meet business goals. He is now Principal of UniComm Consulting, President of Vanguard Communications, and a co-founder of UCStrategies.com. UniComm Consulting and Vanguard Communications are each independent consulting firms focused, respectively, on unified communications (UC) and contact centers and customer interactions. UCStrategies.com is the industry web portal site for information on UC issues and developments. Vanguard's two decades of consulting work in contact centers help people, processes, and data processing and communications systems technology come together to solve an important business objective - providing an efficient and effective means to interact with a company's customers. For the last several years, Don's research, client work, and writing has been increasingly focused on the emerging field of unified communications. Several years ago, he and Marty Parker, a colleague from early voice messaging days, began working together on these issues. In 2007 they created UniComm Consulting, an independent consulting firm to concentrate on helping enterprises to understand the potential for UC in their business, develop strategies appropriate to their goals and opportunities, identify specific applications and associated ROI, help identify supplier partners, and assist with implementation, including project management, change leadership, and metrics. In addition to his client projects through Vanguard and UniComm Consulting, Don writes articles and columns and speaks frequently at industry conferences on these subjects. Don has an undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Contact Don at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com.
Reactor Panelist - Steve Donovan, Technical Leader, Cisco Systems
Reactor Panelist - Lawrence Byrd, Director, Unified Communication Architecture, Avaya
Lawrence Byrd is Director of Unified Communications Architecture and helps drive the definition and communication of Avaya's intelligent communications strategy. Lawrence has eighteen years of communications, CRM and contact center experience and thirty years of advanced software and Internet experience. Lawrence was co-founder of Quintus Corporation in 1984 where he held executive positions in software development, marketing and strategy. Quintus was a leading provider of multimedia contact center software that was acquired by Avaya in 2001. Lawrence has a BA in Philosophy from Durham, England, was a research associate in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and now lives with his family in California.
Reactor Panelist - Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Dan York is Director of Conversations at Voxeo Corporation heading up the company's communication through both traditional and new/social media. Previously, Dan served in Voxeo's Office of the CTO focused on analyzing/evaluating emerging technology, participating in industry standards bodies and addressing VoIP security issues. 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. Dan frequently 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 at DisruptiveTelephony.com and Voxeo's weblogs at blogs.voxeo.com
Reactor Panelist - David Marshak, Senior Product Manager, IBM Sametime, IBM Software Group
How do you translate network performance metrics and thresholds into terms that accurately judge the quality of the service that's being delivered—and then how do you make sure that the service you deliver for IP telephony meets or exceeds the promised service levels? In this session, colleagues will share their experiences.
John Bartlett John Bartlett is a leading authority on real-time traffic, application performance and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. He specializes in helping enterprises manage voice, video and data application performance. Recent work has focused on designing global networks to best support video conferencing and telepresence systems. John has 32 years of experience in the semiconductor, computer and communications fields in marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing and consulting roles. He has contributed to microprocessor, computer and network equipment design for over 40 products. He has been consulting since 1996. Prior to working as a consultant, John was a founder and VP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Agile Networks, now part of Lucent Technologies. Under his leadership, the company designed and built a high performance Ethernet switch implementing VLANs, and one of the first commercial ATM switches. Both products were successfully introduced to the market and the firm became profitable before it was acquired. Mr. Bartlett also served on the IEEE 802.1 committee during this period, and contributed to the development of the IEEE 802.1P and IEEE 802.1Q standards (priority and VLANs.) John is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, where he received the Dartmouth Society of Engineers Annual Prize for the quality of his thesis presentation. John is co-owner of a patent in shared memory multiprocessor design.
How is your enterprise tackling the challenge of running converged networks and integrating communications with business applications? Do your communications teams talk to your applications teams? Do they know what the company's datacenter strategy is, and how that will affect the way communications are run within your enterprise? How are you coping with the pressures of headcount reduction? Come share your problems and your solutions with your colleagues.
Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
With the sale of the Nortel Enterprise Solutions business unit, customers with installed Nortel equipment will be facing a new world in 2010 and beyond. What effect will the Nortel sale have on these products' life span, and how will the new vendor landscape affect your migration and purchasing decisions going forward. This session is for everyone who owns any significant amount of Nortel gear and wants to know what will become of it. You'll come away with as good an understanding of the future prospects as possible, and you'll know what questions to ask to make sure you don't wind up with stranded investments or a migration strategy that doesn't migrate. The session will be broken into two parts. The first part will be a pair of presentations; veteran consultant Steve Leaden will discuss product implications of the Nortel transition, and veteran industry analyst Zeus Kerravala will lay out his vision for what the marketplace will look like going forward. Then, in the second half of this Deep Dive, we'll throw the floor open into a freewheeling Birds of a Feather-style format, where audience members can exchange ideas and ask questions in an informal, unstructured format. KEY QUESTIONS: * What legacy Nortel products are likely to remain following this transition, and which are likely to be phased out? What will that phase-out period look like? * How do you ensure that you continue to get the level of service and support that your existing Nortel gear requires? * When you go out to bid on new procurements, how do you factor in your legacy Nortel infrastructure? * What approach are competing vendors taking toward the Nortel situation and how it affects the competitive landscape? Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
Speaker - Stephen Leaden, President, Leaden Associates, Inc.
Stephen Leaden is founder and President of Leaden Associates, Inc., an independent Telecommunications IT consulting firm providing specialized support in Telecommunications technologies and ROI strategies. Mr. Leaden has been in the Telecommunications field over 25 years, with 18 of those with his own firm. Clients include recognized enterprise clients in healthcare/education, manufacturing, financial services, publishing, and government vertical market segments. Mr. Leaden's firm focuses as an extension of IT staff to facilitate the design, procurement, project implementation, and outsourcing for converged voice and data solutions. During their engagement, Leaden Associates proactively adds value via ROI strategies integrated into the projects they serve on. Mr. Leaden's practice has focused on Voice over IP and key market trends in this area - he has spoken at national and International conferences on VoIP, has written several papers on VoIP strategies, troubleshooting and security, and has been quoted in national industry publications including NoJitter, BCR Magazine, Computer World, Information Week, and the Washington Post among others. Mr. Leaden is on the faculty of Telecom+UC Training (a spin-off of BCR Training) and teaches two courses: "Cost Control of Wired and Wireless Networks: Best Practices and "Optimizing Enterprise Networks".
Speaker - David Stein, Principal, Director of Operations, PlanNet Consulting
Mr. Stein is a principal with PlanNet Consulting and Director of Operations. He has more than 30 years of consulting, information technology and telecommunications experience, with a primary emphasis on voice, data and video communications projects. His experience includes traditional voice (PBX, TDM, carrier), data and video communications as well as all aspects of their convergence (IP Telephony, Unified Communications, Video over IP). PlanNet Consulting assists enterprises with all elements of the technology lifecycle (e.g. needs assessment, requirements definition, procurement, implementation and optimization). Mr. Stein leads a team of over 20 consultants that includes experts in communications technologies, physical infrastructure, security, audio visual and data centers. He has been a featured speaker at numerous conferences including American Library Association, Interop, ACUTA, CoreNet, IPComm, BICSI, CISOA and VoiceCon. He has also authored several articles on IP Telephony that have been published in Business Communications Review and HIMSS. Mr. Stein graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a degree in Computer Science. .
Speaker - Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group
Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
Speaker - Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, leads Yankee Group's Global Enterprise and Consumer Research Kerravala's team analyzes the impact of connectivity transformation on the Anywhere Consumer and the Anywhere Enterprise, and probes the changes to behaviors, motivations and technologies that result. Kerravala manages the research and consulting agenda that enables clients to meet the demands of the global connectivity revolution. Kerravala's expertise involves working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading infrastructure consulting firm. Earlier, he was the vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic brokerage firm, deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, where he was responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Kerravala holds a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Brad Tompkins assumed the role of INNUA president on October 1, 2009. In this role he will be responsible for the strategic direction for the 4000+ member organization globally. Tompkins is also the Director of Technology Services for an insurance carrier headquartered in Columbia South Carolina. In his 15+ year career, Tompkins has overseen all aspects of voice and data networks for SMBs and Fortune 100 companies. A graduate of the University of South Carolina, Tompkins resides in Columbia, SC, with his wife and two daughters.
Moderator - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
As we enter the era of truly converged networks the ground-rules for network design are changing. Enterprises have been interleaving voice, data and video for a long time, but now the challenge is to design and build converged LANs and WANs that carry both single-mode and multimode applications. This session will give you a detailed understanding of the design issues you will encounter, techniques for overcoming them, and the specific technologies and practices that are required to make real-time traffic and applications run efficiently and at acceptable quality across your local and wide-area facilities. KEY QUESTIONS: * What is required to deliver adequate quality of service (QOS) for voice and video on any local and wide-area IP networks that previously handled only data? Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)? * How do you implement security on this converged network? * How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers? * How will SIP trunk implementation affect security and quality of service?
John Bartlett John Bartlett is a leading authority on real-time traffic, application performance and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. He specializes in helping enterprises manage voice, video and data application performance. Recent work has focused on designing global networks to best support video conferencing and telepresence systems. John has 32 years of experience in the semiconductor, computer and communications fields in marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing and consulting roles. He has contributed to microprocessor, computer and network equipment design for over 40 products. He has been consulting since 1996. Prior to working as a consultant, John was a founder and VP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Agile Networks, now part of Lucent Technologies. Under his leadership, the company designed and built a high performance Ethernet switch implementing VLANs, and one of the first commercial ATM switches. Both products were successfully introduced to the market and the firm became profitable before it was acquired. Mr. Bartlett also served on the IEEE 802.1 committee during this period, and contributed to the development of the IEEE 802.1P and IEEE 802.1Q standards (priority and VLANs.) John is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, where he received the Dartmouth Society of Engineers Annual Prize for the quality of his thesis presentation. John is co-owner of a patent in shared memory multiprocessor design.
Reactor Panelist - Paul Liesenberg, Enterprise Architecture Technology Manager, Cisco
Paul Liesenberg works for Cisco as a senior manager for Collaboration Architecture. Prior to joining Cisco, Paul was VP of Marketing for Linux network appliance vendor Bivio Networks. Before Bivio, Paul spent 4 years at ZettaCom as VP of Strategic Marketing, orchestrating ZettaCom's product and partnership strategy. Previously, Paul had already spent 8 years at Cisco Systems (through the acquisition of StrataCom) in product marketing, business development, sales and technical marketing positions. Paul also worked in Nortel's Data Networks Division as manager for network consulting; and for Siemens' Public Networks' R&D division. Paul holds an M.Sc. from TUM (Technische Universitaet Muenchen) and holds patents in VoIP technology.
Reactor Panelist - Harpreet Chadha, Senior Director of Product Management, Extreme Networks
Reactor Panelist - Manfred Arndt, HP Distinguished Technologist, Hewlett Packard
Manfred Arndt is a Distinguished Technologist and the Convergence Solutions Architect for HP ProCurve Networking. He is responsible for architecting IP telephony and multimedia capabilities in HP ProCurve's networking products. He also participates in several TIA and IEEE subcommittees, helping defining networking and telecommunications standards and is a co-author of the ANSI/TIA-1057 (LLDP-MED) standard. Arndt has over 20 years experience with several networking startups and the high-tech industry. Arndt holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He also holds three networking patents.
While every IP PBX and UC vendor touts mobility, the range of options seems to have confounded the buyer and stymied adoption. This session will provide a deep dive into the full range of FMC and mobile UC options that are available today, their capabilities and limitations, and most importantly, their potential to reduce cost and improve accessibility. Dual-mode FMC solutions that combine Wi-Fi and cellular services seem to have dominated the discussion, but that is only one of myriad potential implementations. Those options include offerings from IP PBX vendors, UC platforms, third-party adjuncts, as well as from the mobile operators and handset manufacturers. Our purpose is to line up all of the potential implementations, describe how they work, the features they offer, and the cost and functionality benefits they can provide--no holds barred. KEY QUESTIONS * What are the end user cost and functionality benefits of FMC and Mobile UC? * What is the status and adoption rates of the various FMC and Mobile UC offerings * Do we need WLAN voice (or DECT) as part of the solution? * What changes would have to be made to the WLAN to support voice and what will they cost? * What are the design issues, key tradeoffs, and technical gotchas? * What do the mobile operators have in the way of FMC, and is UMA the only way? * Which option provides better indoor coverage, a WLAN or a DAS? Is there a place for enterprise femtocells? * Is there a role for cellular gateways in an FMC/MobUC implementation? * What real world examples and cost savings can be shown from FMC in the enterprise?
Michael Finneran, Principal of dBrn Associates, Inc. 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 field, his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Mr. Finneran has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon, InterOp, and the Mobile Business Expo. In the consulting area, he has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. A long time columnist for Business Communications Review, he now contributes regularly to NoJitter and UC Strategies. Well respected as an educator, Mr. Finneran has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His programs are offered through Telecom+UC Training. A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Is communications security simply about attackers hacking into IP-PBXs or bringing down converged networks with denial of service attacks? Or—given the expansive nature of Unified Communications and the importance of mobility—do you need to re-assess security in a broader context? In this session, we'll look at risk assessment for the range of communications systems your users currently employ, as well as the issues that you'll likely need to be prepared for in the future. You'll come away with an understanding of how to attack the problem of security, what to prioritize and how to actually make your communications more secure. KEY QUESTIONS: * What are the most serious voice-oriented attacks that are actually being carried out today? What potential attacks are likely to occur before long? * How much of your security budget should focus on purely VOIP network elements as opposed to other infrastructure components - e.g., switches and routers? * If your users run enterprise software on their mobile devices, how do you secure these systems, and prevent them from being avenues of attack into the network? * What social engineering attacks should you be most concerned about? * What types of equipment and technologies must you implement to stop voice-oriented attacks?
Panelist - Michael Leo, Director, Enterprise and Contact Center Solutions Marketing, Acme Packet
Michael Leo is responsible for developing the marketing strategy and messaging for Acme Packet Session Border Control (SBC) solutions for use in mid-to-large enterprises and organizations deploying media-rich contact centers. Prior to joining Acme Packet in March of 2009, he was Director of Convergence Solutions for 3Com Unified Communication organization. Michael has more than twenty-four years of sales, marketing and management experience in various high tech industries with companies such as Honeywell, Tel Plus Communications, ROLM, Siemens, Cisco Systems and 3Com. He earned a bachelor's degree in Communications from Rutgers University and was elected in 2005 to the Board of Directors of the Enterprise Communications Association. Michael is also a frequent guest speaker and panel participant at many technology and vertical industry events including VoiceCon, ACUTA, IT Expo, IBM COMMON, Lotusphere and Interop.
Moderator - Mark Collier, CTO/VP Engineering, SecureLogix
Mark Collier is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President of Engineering for SecureLogix Corporation. Mr. Collier is responsible for SecureLogix's technology direction and research/development. Mark manages the development of SecureLogix's Enterprise Telephony Management (ETM) System product line. Mark also manages the development of SecureLogix's various security service offerings. Mr. Collier is actively performing research in the area of Voice Over IP (VoIP) security. This includes development of custom security assessment tools. Mark leads SecureLogix's VoIP security assessments and is an expert on issues facing enterprises during their VoIP deployments. Mr. Collier has recently authored the Hacking Exposed: VoIP book, which describes actual attacks, use of existing and new tools, and practical countermeasures. See www.hackingvoip.com for more information about this book. All of the custom tools developed for the book are also available on this website. Mr. Collier has been working in the industry for over 20 years, with the past 10 in security, telecommunications, and networking. Mark is a frequent author and presenter on the topic of voice and VoIP security. Mark is a founding member of the Voice Over IP Security Alliance (VoIPSA). Mark has been named one of the most influential people in VoIP and maintains a widely read blog at www.voipsecurityblog.com. Mr. Collier was formerly with Southwest Research Institute, where he directed research in the areas of security and Information Warfare/Operations. Mr. Collier holds a BS degree from St. Mary's University.
The humble phone call has been around for well over 100 years and continues to be one of the most reliable forms of technology in business. But what if the granddaddy of electronic communication could be reinvented by adopting the speed and agility of email and its upstart relatives? In his address Dr. Alan Baratz, President of Global Communications Solutions and Senior Vice President at Avaya, will share his views on "Voice 2.0," technology under development that will merge the emotion of the spoken word with the flexible attributes of text that can be edited, searched, stored, retrieved and transmitted to one or many individuals. Baratz will further relay his views on the changing world of collaboration, in which voice, video and text communication modes converge to provide new capabilities for probing, analyzing and solving the complex problems that require human interaction.
Speaker - Dr. Alan Baratz, Senior Vice President; President, Global Communication Solutions, Avaya
Dr. Alan Baratz joined Avaya in October 2008 as Senior Vice President and President - Global Communications Solutions (GCS). In this capacity, he is accountable for the full life cycle of the company's Intelligent Communications products; including all activity supporting innovation, design, development and launch of Avaya's product offerings. His organization includes the company's three strategic business units: Contact Center, Unified Communications, and Integrated Office Communications for the small and midsized enterprise market. Before joining Avaya, Alan was most recently the Senior Vice President for Cisco's Network Software and Systems Technology Group. In this role, he was responsible for Cisco's core software organization, comprising more than 2,400 software developers and supporting more than $20B of network product sales. Previously, Alan served as President of Sun Microsystems' Software division, with responsibility for all of Sun's software products (including Solaris and Java) as well as software sales and software marketing. He has also held leadership positions at IBM and served as CEO of several information technology startups, as well as partner and advisor to several venture capital and private equity firms. Alan holds both a doctorate and a master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from UCLA.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
Speaker - Bruce Morse, Vice President Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Bruce Morse is Vice President, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group. In his role, Mr. Morse has overall responsibility for IBM's Unified Communications and Collaboration software business unit, including setting strategy, delivering innovative software products such as IBM Lotus Sametime, catalyzing associated IBM hardware and services offerings and building key industry alliances. Mr. Morse has over twenty five years of software and hardware experience in the IT industry and has held key executive positions in marketing, product management, engineering, business development, mergers and acquisitions, and finance. Prior to his current role, he led IBM's industry software solutions organization helping clients leverage SOA and IBM software to improve their business processes. Mr. Morse also led IBM's Contact Center Software and Client Technologies business units, and played a leading role in establishing WebSphere Portal as the market leader in enterprise portals. Mr. Morse received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University, Chicago Illinois, and has participated in graduate courses in business administration.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
The VoiceCon User Forum will present enterprise executives discussing their experiences with migrating to new communications infrastructures, architectures and services. In a roundtable format, the speakers will describe what went into their decision-making for migrating, and they'll describe their implementation experiences —what went right and what didn't. The panelists will discuss benefits and problems, and offer perspective and advice that reflect their real-world experience. In addition to discussing the technical issues, the speakers will address the impact that new technologies and architectures are having on end users and the IT/telecom organization.
Panelist - Arthur Brant, Director, Networking Services, Abilene Christian University
Arthur Brant is the Director of Networking Services for Abilene Christian University (ACU), a selective, private, master's-level university located in Abilene, Texas. Since 2008, ACU has been engaged in an innovative mobile learning initiative that has garnered awards including Alcatel-Lucent's Dynamic Enterprise Analyst Choice Award. As ACU implements strategies for a "connected" 21st century campus, Arthur's primary engagement is the design, implementation, and maintenance of a usable and reliable communications infrastructure and fostering relationships with technology partners. Arthur has been working with ACU for twelve years in varied telecommunications and networking roles and has expertise in telephony and data networking technologies. Arthur is a frequent speaker at Higher Education and Information Technology conference.
Jamie Libow is an Engineering Director at Travelers, one of the largest Property Casualty Insurers in the US. He is responsible for the Voice portfolio of services for the company, which includes voice systems, voicemail/unified messaging, mobility and integration to unified communications systems. He joined Travelers in 1996 and has worked in various departments including Data Network Engineering, Data Network Operations, Distributed/Server Operations, Call Center Technologies, Voice Engineering and Unified Communications. Jamie has a BA in Psychology from Queens College, a BE in Electrical Engineering from Stony Brook University, and an MS in Computer Science from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Hartford, CT.
Panelist - Walter Curd, VP and CIO, Maxim Integrated Products
Walter Curd is currently VP and CIO for Maxim Integrated Products, the leading Analog Semiconductor Company. In that position he has led a modernization effort of infrastructure and applications that has begun to produce substantial business benefits. Prior to that he built the IT Organization for Marvell Semiconductor to support their growth from $300M to over $3.0B during his tenure. He has also led the IT organizations for Fujitsu, Electroglas, and CyberIQ System.
Panelist - Bill Schlough, Senior Vice President & CIO, San Francisco Giants
Bill Schlough oversees a team of dedicated professionals that provide day-to-day technical support while working with internal clients to set the technological direction for the San Francisco Giants. Since he joined the team in 1999, the Giants have demonstrated a sustained commitment to enhancing the fan experience through innovations such as the "Double Play Ticket Window," "Ticket Relay," the "Digital Dugout," customer-facing contactless payment systems, universal gift cards, "Wi-Fi Replay," pervasive Hi-Definition video displays, and the first 100-percent wireless venue in professional sports. An Olympic enthusiast, Schlough is a member of the Bay Area Sports Organizing Committee (BASOC) executive committee and served as a technology lead for San Francisco's bids to host both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games. His event experience includes assignments at the 1994 World Cup along with Olympic Games in Atlanta, Salt Lake and Torino, Italy. Previously, he worked as a consultant with Booz-Allen Hamilton and Electronic Data Systems, supporting a diverse collection of clients including AMD, Northrop Grumman and General Motors. A San Francisco native, Schlough holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from Duke University and an MBA from the Wharton School.
Panelist - Randy Paine, IT & Facilities Manager, Arlington Chamber of Commerce
Moderator - Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, leads Yankee Group's Global Enterprise and Consumer Research Kerravala's team analyzes the impact of connectivity transformation on the Anywhere Consumer and the Anywhere Enterprise, and probes the changes to behaviors, motivations and technologies that result. Kerravala manages the research and consulting agenda that enables clients to meet the demands of the global connectivity revolution. Kerravala's expertise involves working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading infrastructure consulting firm. Earlier, he was the vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic brokerage firm, deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, where he was responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Kerravala holds a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Moderator - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
In this session, executives from the leading vendors offer their assessment of Unified Communications' evolution to date: What's available now, and what's coming over the next 12 months. The discussion will also cover the barriers that must be overcome for UC to fulfill its potential - especially interoperability and TCO/ROI concerns, and will examine the various pricing models. KEY QUESTIONS * What are prospects for UC adoption given the weak economy and enterprise budget cuts? * What are the top UC applications in terms of actual implementation? What hard savings or ROI exist? Are any "true" UC apps being adopted, or is it all about audioconferencing bridges and other routes to a quick payback? * What specific examples exist of enterprises using UC to change their business processes? Name names. * What interoperability challenges remain, and how are enterprises tackling the systems integration challenges posed by UC? * How have the vendors changed their approach to pricing for UC capabilities, and what impact are these changes having? What's next in the evolution of UC pricing? * Are vendors giving away UC apps to sell their call control platforms - or vice versa? MODERATOR: Jim Burton
Panelist - Mike Bergelson, Director, Strategy, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Mike is responsible for developing new product and business model strategies for Cisco's Unified Communications portfolio. Prior to this role, he managed Cisco's suite of customer care applications. Mr. Bergelson joined Cisco in June 2006 with the acquisition of Audium, where he was a co-founder and the Chief Executive Officer. He was also co-founder and CEO of Conducive, an online advertising firm. Prior to founding Audium and Conducive, Mr. Bergelson was with First Manhattan Consulting Group where he advised clients on customer contact strategies, customer profitability and product development. Mr. Bergelson frequently speaks at industry conferences and forums and earned an engineering degree with honors from Cornell University.
Saied Seghatoleslami is currently Vice President of Business Operations for the Avaya products group, the Global Communications Solutions. In this position, he is accountable for pricing, quality assurance and general services. Prior to his current assignment, Saied was the Vice President of Product Management in the Communications Appliance Division where he launched the very successful 9600 IP phone product line. He has also held executive positions in Small and Medium Business and Unified Communications. Saied has been in the communications industry since 1982 - holding positions at Avaya, Lucent and AT&T - with responsibilities for product development, customer technical support, product management, outsourcing, manufacturing and logistics process development and implementation. Prior to joining AT&T, he held positions with Exxon, Vydec and Bendix.
Panelist - Joe Staples, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Interactive Intelligence
JOSEPH A. STAPLES serves as senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Interactive Intelligence. He oversees the global marketing efforts of the company's award winning contact center and IP communication product lines. Mr. Staples brings 25+ years of experience in technology and marketing to Interactive Intelligence, including specific assignments in the areas of computer telephony, unified messaging, mobile wireless, computer networking, and computer-based education.
Panelist - Akiba Saeedi, Program Director, Unified Communications and Collaboration, IBM Software Group
Jim Burton is Founder and CXO of CT Link, LLC and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. Burton founded the consulting firm in 1989 to help clients in the converging voice, data and networking industries with strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances and distribution issues. In the early 1990s, Burton recognized the challenges vendors and the channel faced as they developed and installed integrated voice/data products. He became the leading authority in the voice/data integration industry and is credited with "coining" the term computer-telephone integration (CTI). Burton helped companies including Microsoft and Intel enter the voice market and helped AT&T (now Avaya), Mitel, NEC, Nortel, Siemens and Toshiba with their CTI strategies. In the late 1990s, venture capitalists turned to Burton for help in evaluating potential investments in IP PBX start-ups. He went on to help these and other companies with strategic planning and partnering, including NBX (acquired by 3Com, Selsius (acquired by Cisco), ShoreTel and Sphere Communications. In the early 2000s, Burton began focusing on wireless services and technologies. In 2005 Burton started helping vendors with their Unified Communications strategy and in 2006, along with several colleagues, created a web site, UCStrategies.com, to provide information for enterprise customers and vendors.
Pricing for communications systems had already been evolving rapidly, as the industry moved to software, with its pricing models. Now, as vendors seek new ways to sell products and push UC in a difficult economic climate, they're trying even more different and varying pricing strategies. In this session, we'll look at the range of pricing and licensing issues across communications capabilities—from basic IP-PBXs to UC applications, and you'll get a sense of the tradeoffs and negotiating strategies you'll need to get the best value for your communications investment. KEY QUESTIONS: * How has the shift from hardware to software fees affected the final system price and TCO? * How does the new cost architecture impact your negotiating strategies? * What license fees are typically charged on top of the cost of IP phones, messaging systems and other elements? How much do these fees run? * What are the hidden costs in the new licensing structures, and how do you find them? * Are vendors giving away UC application licenses in order to get the IP-PBX sale—or vice versa?
SIP trunking is one the hottest issues in enterprise communications because it promises cost savings and true end-to-end IP voice connections. But few enterprises are actually using SIP Trunks to their full potential yet—partly because of the way in which carriers are offering these services, and partly because technical/interoperability challenges remain. In this workshop, Sorell Slaymaker, an industry expert, will help you understand the challenges in implementing SIP trunking so that you can begin to deploy them and take advantage of their benefits. The workshop will focus on the 4 steps towards best practices in implementing SIP trunking. You'll come away from this workshop better prepared to capture the benefits of SIP trunking for your enterprise, in cost savings and in IP voice application networking. PART 1: Architecture - What is the right design for your organization? I. Overview - How SIP trunking fits into an overall SIP strategy and what are all the components required. Can you speak SIP? II. Centralized vs. Decentralized - Using SIP trunks gives an organization the option of terminating all telephony trunks into a few data centers. Is this the right model for your organization? III. Security - VoIP/SIP has some inherent security risks over traditional TDM telephony. What are the options and how far should your organization go in securing SIP trunks? IV. Cost Optimization - Moving to SIP trunks will lower an organization's telephony costs. What is the balance between maximizing cost savings and ensuring toll quality voice and other features? V. High Availability - SIP trunking can be designed to be 99.999% available. Is this a requirement for your organization in this day and age when everyone carries a cell phone? PART 2: Carriers - How should you order SIP trunks from a Carrier? I. Toll Free - Customer calls are critical. How much information about the call do you want to be sent with the call? Knowing if they are calling from a cell phone, call party number, ?? II. Long Distance - VoIP allows for drastic reductions in long distance costs, especially international. What type of routing strategy should an organization use to optimize call quality while minimizing call expense? III. Local - Local phone trunks can be the hardest to convert to SIP due to features such as fax/modem support, n11 services, DID number portability, and LEC capability in a geographical area. Do you move all, some, or none of your local phone trunks to SIP at this time? Part 3: Session Border Controllers - What role does an SBC play? I. Required Features - SBCs are more than a voice firewall. Do you need features such as transcoding, protocol conversion, call routing on your SBC? II. Configuration Options - SBCs are the demarcation point between you and the carrier. What should you enable to ensure optimal security, quality, and supportability? III. Integration with other SIP Components - Some SBCs have an extended feature set. Which features should you use the SBC for, as opposed to seeking other devices in your network to support? Part 4: Supportability - Maintaining SIP Trunks I. Ensuring Call Quality - One of the fears of going to VoIP is not delivering "toll quality". What can you do to monitor and ensure voice quality? II. Maintaining High Availability - Voice is considered mission critical. Do you know the best practices for designing and maintaining high availability? III. Troubleshooting - If something outright fails, troubleshooting should be relatively straightforward. It is when there is an intermittent problem that troubleshooting can be difficult. What are you going to do when your CEO complains that his last phone call got cut off prematurely?
Instructor - Sorell Slaymaker, Communications Architect, Unified IT Systems
Sorell Slaymaker VP - Communications Architecture Unified IT Systems LLC sorell@unifieditsystems.com Sorell has 20 years of experience designing, building, and operating networks and the communication services that run across them. Particular areas of expertise include; unified communications, contact centers, CRM, SIP, and tele-medicine. Sorell has tested and installed SIP trunks from the major carriers and saved millions of dollars on monthly Telecom expenses in the process. He has been a member of the Cisco and Avaya technical advisory boards. Sorell graduated from Texas A&M with a B.S. in Telecom Engineering, and went through the M.E. Telecom program at the University of Colorado. Sorell writes at: http://nojitter.com/blogs/authors/sorell_slaymaker.html On the weekends, Sorell enjoys the outdoors - bicycling, camping, and gardening.
This tutorial will provide a comprehensive overview of the options available for Unified Communications along with an assessment of suppliers for each option. It is intended for enterprise CXOs, decision-makers, IT managers, communications managers, and business managers who are planning to install UC -- either via a new system or by adding UC to existing PBXs, email systems and business applications. The session will highlight the five most popular Unified Communications enterprise deployment options. The functions of each option will be outlined, with reference to use cases and the vertical industries in which each UC option is most commonly deployed. Savings and ROI elements of each option will be highlighted. The five are: 1. IP-PBX augmented with supplier's UC modules -- Integrate to e-mail, office, and business software packages. 2. UC software system as the primary communication platform for all or selected users -- Integrate to PBX(s), e-mail, office, and business software packages. 3. UC software product(s) as overlay with integration to existing communication tools - PBX(s), e-mail, office & business software packages. Use Internet-based/hosted consumer UC packages (non-integrated). 4. Mobility UC package as an overlay to existing PBX(s), e-mail, office, and business software packages. 5. Add UC functions to your business software packages for specific jobs and roles. The top-ranking vendors for each of the options will be compared and evaluated, with reference to the specific products and designs that each vendor offers and implements. Estimated pricing of each approach will be included in the analysis. Vendors that are reviewed will react and respond to this analysis. This tutorial will provide attendees with: * A basis for comparing and selecting the UC options best suited to their enterprise. * A framework for decision-making about investment choices for UC, along with ROI information. * Descriptions and diagrams of solutions applicable for each UC deployment option. Representatives from Aastra, Avaya, Alcatel Lucent, Cisco, IBM, Interactive Intelligence, Microsoft, Mitel, NEC, RIM, ShoreTel and Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Instructor - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI. Marty is co-founder of UniComm Consulting, the industry's premier independent consulting firm providing strategy, planning and implementation support for enterprises in all industry segments. Marty is also co-founder of UCStrategies.com, the industry's leading forum for UC information and dialog. Marty created the workshop, Planning and Implementing Unified Communications, offered though BCR Training since 2006 and now available through Telecom + UC Training. Involved providing UC sessions at VoiceCon since 2006, Marty will be delivering the industry review, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" as well as leading the deep-dive session, "Unified Communications Implementation." As a student of UC successes and case studies, Marty will moderate the important session, "Communications Enabled Apps in Action: Case Studies" at which customer executives will highlight their actual UC experiences. Marty bases is UC activities on his experience in sales, strategic planning, product line management, financial management and general management positions in both computing (IBM) and communications (ATT/Lucent/Avaya) firms, as well as with two venture funded firms and with a very large west-coast telecom interconnect firm in the 1980s.
Behind the basic question--How big is the Unified Communications market, and which vendors are winning/losing?—lurks a more difficult question: What "counts" as Unified Communications when we're measuring this market? In this session, a leading UC analyst will present research that looks at the market's size, players and prospects, the impact of UC on end users and future trends. KEY QUESTIONS: * Who are the principal players, and how are they positioning themselves? * How is Unified Communications defined, and who—according to this definition—is really selling in this market? Who's buying? * What are the drivers behind the growth from a customer perspective? * What are the current and likely future patterns of adoption—e.g., by job type, mobile work, business process? * How is the current economic climate affecting adoption? Will this market take off?
Speaker - Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC
Blair Pleasant is President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC, and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. She provides consulting and market research analysis on unified communications, unified messaging, and contact center markets and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. Prior to COMMfusion, Ms. Pleasant was Director of Communications Analysis for The PELORUS Group, a market research and consulting firm, and President of Lower Falls Consulting.
Following up on Brent Kelly's extensive Monday tutorial, this session gives you a chance to discuss what you've seen in your own enterprise as you've explored desktop UC portals.
Brent Kelly has written numerous articles and reports on Unified Communications, focusing on Microsoft, IBM, and telephony vendors layering UC solutions on top of their PBXs. He has spoken and taught seminars on Unified Communications and on implementing IP Rich Media Communications in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He leads the Unified Communications practice group at Wainhouse Research.
In most enterprises, keeping costs down is still Job 1 (and probably Jobs 2, 3 and more). You've already worked hard at this, but you're probably being asked to do even more. What's left to do? What avenues should you explore to ferret out even more cost savings? Should you be giving a fresh look to new Telecom Expense Management (TEM) software? What about automation of network management? Come share tips on cost control.
Moderator - Robert Harris, President, Communications Advantage, Inc.
Robert Lee Harris is the President of Communications Advantage, Inc. As a seasoned consultant, Robert brings both intuitive technical knowledge and solid management skills to consulting projects. Robert Harris and Communications Advantage have focused on TEM system and process evaluation since 2003 and have followed the evolution of these solutions from a niche set of products to the high ROI solutions that they are today. Robert Harris has contributed articles to Business Communications Review and NoJitter on subjects ranging from telecom and wireless cost management to future technology trends and speaks frequently on Telecom Expense management at industry conferences. Robert currently serves as Senior VP and Board Member of the Society of Telecommunications Consultants (STC).
Mobility is one of the key features of UC, however, each vendor seems to have a different range of solutions. Some depend on cellular service exclusively which can add to already spiraling cellular bills. Since many cellular calls are made while the user is within the facility, moving those calls onto the wireless LAN can have a major impact on cellular usage, and Wi-Fi also supports higher data rates than the cellular carriers' 3G services--however, upgrading the WLAN to support voice may represent a major cost. Some vendors either build or partner to provide dual mode Wi-Fi cellular that combine the two technologies and can transparently hand off calls. There are also Wi-Fi only and DECT solutions to support users who are mobile but only within the building or campus. The VoiceCon team has put together a request for proposal for a mobile UC solution to work in conjunction with an IP PBX deployment; the overall network will be identical to the one Marty Parker is using for his tutorial on "Comparing UC Options and Vendors--Who's Offering What". We've added a set of mobility requirements, but not specified a particular technology solution. We've asked each of the major vendors to propose a solution based on their existing product lines, identify the products required to implement it, and provide cost per user and for the entire solution. Leading vendors have been asked to participate, and each will get the opportunity to describe their solution, why they chose it, and to highlight the cost and particular advantages of their approach. We have also asked them to complete a feature matrix, which we will use to summarize and compare their offerings. Mobility is an increasingly important element in UC and this deep dive will allow you to: - See what the vendors have to offer on the mobility front - Understand the elements involved in their solutions, and the particular features they offer - Recognize what it will cost to add mobility to UC - Determine how creatively they can address mobility requirements KEY QUESTIONS * What is the most cost effective way to integrate mobility for users who split their time in and out of the office? How about those who are mobile only within the office? * What elements are actually involved in adding mobility to each vendor's UC solution, what do they cost, and are they available separately or bundled with other UC features? * Can an integrated mobility solution be cost justified on its own or do we have to look for soft productivity benefits? * If the costs of upgrading a WLAN to support voice are significant, can DECT be a cost effective alternative? * Will users get the same range of features on a cellular-only, dual mode Wi-Fi/cellular, and VoWLAN based mobile solution? Representatives from Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, IBM, Mitel, NEC Infrontia, RIM, ShoreTel and Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Moderator/Speaker - Michael Finneran, Principal, dBrn Associates, Inc
Michael Finneran, Principal of dBrn Associates, Inc. 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 field, his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, 3G/4G Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Mr. Finneran has appeared at hundreds of trade shows and industry conferences including VoiceCon, InterOp, and the Mobile Business Expo. In the consulting area, he has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, and investment firms in the US and overseas. A long time columnist for Business Communications Review, he now contributes regularly to NoJitter and UC Strategies. Well respected as an educator, Mr. Finneran has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. His programs are offered through Telecom+UC Training. A long-time member of the IEEE and the Society of Telecommunications Consultants, Mr. Finneran holds a Masters Degree from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
IT departments need to prove the business relevance of IT investments and capabilities. Unified Communications, as part of an enterprise collaboration architecture, promises to deliver on key productivity gains. This session provides attendees with an introductory tutorial into business process modeling. Examples will be used to show how collaboration technologies can be effectively used to address typical business process issues, and how, as a result, those business processes can be significantly accelerated. The speakers also will analyze business process trends in today's enterprises, and the vital role that collaboration technologies play to deliver on the emerging requirements for a "boundary-less enterprise." Finally, recommendations will be provided on which collaboration capabilities most effectively address a variety of business process issues such as form verification or approval loops. Moderator/Speaker: Paul Liesenberg, Enterprise Architecture and Technology Manager, Cisco Additional Speakers: TBD Paul Liesenberg develops methodologies that optimally align next-generation infrastructures and overarching business processes. Prior to Cisco, Paul was VP of Strategic Marketing for ZettaCom and Bivio Networks. Previously, Paul was with Cisco through the acquisition of StrataCom, and earlier worked in Nortel's Data Networks Division and Siemens' Public Networks' R&D division. He holds two patents in the area of VoIP and holds an M.Sc. from TUM (Technische Universitaet Muenchen). Sorell Slaymaker VP - Communications Architecture Unified IT Systems LLC sorell@unifieditsystems.com Sorell has 20 years of experience designing, building, and operating networks and the communication services that run across them. Particular areas of expertise include; unified communications, contact centers, CRM, SIP, and tele-medicine. Sorell has tested and installed SIP trunks from the major carriers and saved millions of dollars on monthly Telecom expenses in the process. He has been a member of the Cisco and Avaya technical advisory boards. Sorell graduated from Texas A&M with a B.S. in Telecom Engineering, and went through the M.E. Telecom program at the University of Colorado. Sorell writes at: http://nojitter.com/blogs/authors/sorell_slaymaker.html On the weekends, Sorell enjoys the outdoors - bicycling, camping, and gardening.
Speaker - Paul Liesenberg, Enterprise Architecture Technology Manager, Cisco
Paul Liesenberg works for Cisco as a senior manager for Collaboration Architecture. Prior to joining Cisco, Paul was VP of Marketing for Linux network appliance vendor Bivio Networks. Before Bivio, Paul spent 4 years at ZettaCom as VP of Strategic Marketing, orchestrating ZettaCom's product and partnership strategy. Previously, Paul had already spent 8 years at Cisco Systems (through the acquisition of StrataCom) in product marketing, business development, sales and technical marketing positions. Paul also worked in Nortel's Data Networks Division as manager for network consulting; and for Siemens' Public Networks' R&D division. Paul holds an M.Sc. from TUM (Technische Universitaet Muenchen) and holds patents in VoIP technology.
Moderator - Sorell Slaymaker, Communications Architect, Unified IT Systems
Sorell Slaymaker VP - Communications Architecture Unified IT Systems LLC sorell@unifieditsystems.com Sorell has 20 years of experience designing, building, and operating networks and the communication services that run across them. Particular areas of expertise include; unified communications, contact centers, CRM, SIP, and tele-medicine. Sorell has tested and installed SIP trunks from the major carriers and saved millions of dollars on monthly Telecom expenses in the process. He has been a member of the Cisco and Avaya technical advisory boards. Sorell graduated from Texas A&M with a B.S. in Telecom Engineering, and went through the M.E. Telecom program at the University of Colorado. Sorell writes at: http://nojitter.com/blogs/authors/sorell_slaymaker.html On the weekends, Sorell enjoys the outdoors - bicycling, camping, and gardening.
Video is coming into the enterprise in three forms: immersive telepresence; traditional room-based conferencing, perhaps enhanced with high-definition video; and on the user desktop. So one choice that enterprise managers face is, which of these 3 types of video is right for which applications, users and situations? But enterprises face another set of choices when considering video: Where should video fit in relationship to your broader communications architecture and strategy? Should you implement video as a standalone system; as part of your IP telephony strategy; or as part of your Unified Communications strategy? In this Deep Dive session, a leading industry analyst will present a taxonomy of the product configurations and approaches to integration for video in the enterprise. He will discuss in detail the advantages, disadvantages, and optimal uses for each approach, and will cite real-life case studies to illustrate this. He will then lead a discussion with videoconferencing vendors who will explain their approach to delivering this range of capabilities. You will come away understanding the pros and cons of telepresence vs. room-based vs. desktop, as well as the different challenges presented by deploying video in a standalone fashion vs. integrating it with your other communications systems. KEY QUESTIONS: * How do I choose a videoconferencing technology? * What are the issues around desktop-based videoconferencing? How do these differ from group-oriented videoconferencing (i.e., room and telepresence)? * Does this stuff really work? * What is the ROI for videoconferencing and how do I calculate it? How does the ROI vary depending on the type of system (telepresence/room/desktop) and architecture (standalone/integrated)? * Does video really replace travel? How "realistic" does a video system have to be to replace travel?
Brent Kelly has written numerous articles and reports on Unified Communications, focusing on Microsoft, IBM, and telephony vendors layering UC solutions on top of their PBXs. He has spoken and taught seminars on Unified Communications and on implementing IP Rich Media Communications in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He leads the Unified Communications practice group at Wainhouse Research.
Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) refers to the use of UC-based functions to integrate communications with business applications. While the idea is noble -- to make workers and business processes more efficient, and enable enterprises to handle exceptions more quickly and cheaply - it's not easy to accomplish. In this session, enterprise executives who have begun to deploy CEBP will describe their experiences: Where they saved money, where they encountered problems and where they're headed. KEY QUESTIONS * What business processes and types of applications are best suited to integration with voice systems? Where can the "quick wins" be had? * What are the major systems integration and voice quality/performance challenges in CEBP implementations? * Who typically takes the lead in a CEBP project -- specifying, buying/building, integrating and deploying? Is this function best handled within the enterprise or by an outside systems integrator? * What's the role of the business units, CIO and CFO in crafting a CEBP plan, and how should the IT staff interact with them? *How are results measured - hard vs. soft savings, benefits or ROI?
Panelist - Cynthia Wood, Sr.Voice Systems Engineer, Lawrence Berkeley Labs
Senior Voice Systems Engineer at the nationally renowned Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the Department of Energy through its Office of Science. She is responsible for all engineering design and day to day operation control of the laboratory 5000 plus user Aastra Point Span PBX, AVST voice mail, E911 Call Locator, Paetec call management/work order flow billing systems and Paedtec LD Carrier (in the process). With over 21 years in the telecom industry with companies like World Airways, Apple Computer, Contel Systems and Wells Fargo bank, she also brings a depth of knowledge of other systems such as Nortel and Avaya PBX and Avaya/Octel Serenade voicemail systems. Currently she is working on a project at the University of California at Berkeley to replace a legacy voicemail system for 15,000 users with an AVST voicemail system into a multi-pbx/co environment of AT&T Centrex, Avaya SIP Trunking and Nortel Networks PBX.
Leif Haslund, Telecom Manager InAAU Messaging and Interactive Solutions Committee Chair Leif has been involved with Avaya products for 19 year working for companies such as Nordstrom, Expedia, F5, Sprint and The Seattle Times. Currently, he works for Free & Clear, the largest Quit Smoking program in the United Stated with an industry leading 43% success rate. They have over 300 total agents handling over 2.5 million minutes of calls a month. Since starting at Free & Clear Leif has helped streamline process and phone applications to lower costs and improve productivity. Leif also serves as a Messaging /Interactive Solutions Committee Chair for the International Alliance of Avaya Users (InAAU).
Jamie Libow is an Engineering Director at Travelers, one of the largest Property Casualty Insurers in the US. He is responsible for the Voice portfolio of services for the company, which includes voice systems, voicemail/unified messaging, mobility and integration to unified communications systems. He joined Travelers in 1996 and has worked in various departments including Data Network Engineering, Data Network Operations, Distributed/Server Operations, Call Center Technologies, Voice Engineering and Unified Communications. Jamie has a BA in Psychology from Queens College, a BE in Electrical Engineering from Stony Brook University, and an MS in Computer Science from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Hartford, CT.
Moderator - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI. Marty is co-founder of UniComm Consulting, the industry's premier independent consulting firm providing strategy, planning and implementation support for enterprises in all industry segments. Marty is also co-founder of UCStrategies.com, the industry's leading forum for UC information and dialog. Marty created the workshop, Planning and Implementing Unified Communications, offered though BCR Training since 2006 and now available through Telecom + UC Training. Involved providing UC sessions at VoiceCon since 2006, Marty will be delivering the industry review, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" as well as leading the deep-dive session, "Unified Communications Implementation." As a student of UC successes and case studies, Marty will moderate the important session, "Communications Enabled Apps in Action: Case Studies" at which customer executives will highlight their actual UC experiences. Marty bases is UC activities on his experience in sales, strategic planning, product line management, financial management and general management positions in both computing (IBM) and communications (ATT/Lucent/Avaya) firms, as well as with two venture funded firms and with a very large west-coast telecom interconnect firm in the 1980s.
Speaker - Mark Straton, Senior Vice President, Voice and Applications Marketing, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Mark Straton is senior vice president of voice and applications marketing at Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc., a leader in VoIP, unified communication and data networking software, devices and services, with over $4 billion in annual revenues and approximately 14,000 employees. The Voice & Applications unit represents 62% or about $2.5 billion of SEN revenues. Straton has worldwide responsibility for strategic marketing of the company's voice and applications solutions portfolio including strategy and planning, market and competitive intelligence, strategic positioning and messaging, and analyst relations. Since joining Siemens in 1984, he has held a wide range of management positions and is among the principal architects of Siemens HiPath VoIP brand, LifeWorks and the OpenScape unified communications solution and brand. Mr. Straton previously served as senior vice president, global marketing, and had also served as senior vice president of marketing and strategy at Siemens Communications in the United States with responsibility for fixed and mobile carrier networks, mobile phones and enterprise networks. A featured speaker at numerous international industry events, Straton has appeared on Bloomberg TV on unified communication, testified before the U.S. Congress as an expert on teleworking and has penned articles for leading publications focusing on IP convergence. Straton is a board member for the IT Solutions Marketing Association and holds a B.A. degree in economics from the University of Michigan as well as advanced management certificates from Stanford and Duke.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
Enterprise workforces continue to be more dispersed, meaning that the applications that connect these far-flung co-workers are more mission-critical than ever. At the same time, these applications are creating ever more stringent demands on the wide area networks that support them. These internal applications require enterprise WANs that can provide increasing levels of bandwidth and high quality of service. At the same time, enterprises see an opportunity to reduce their costs and modernize their communications infrastructure by implementing IP in a true end-to-end fashion, including over the public network. This has driven demand for SIP trunking services, which promise bandwidth efficiency and lower cost, as well as fewer IP-to-TDM transitions from end to end. But SIP trunks are not available ubiquitously, nor are pricing, SLAs and other factors settled. To address this range of issues, we're convening a VoiceCon Summit that will help enterprise technologists and decision makers understand what's required to connect the virtual workforce across a city or across the globe. Our panel of experts will discuss the technology requirements, application demands, carrier offerings and negotiating challenges that confront enterprise managers, helping you to get a complete picture of the services aspect of your communications environment. You will come away from this session understanding what to expect from carriers as you build out or update your wide area services.
Speaker - David Rohde, Senior Consultant, TechCaliber Consulting, LLC
David Rohde is a Senior Consultant at TechCaliber Consulting, LLC (TC2) based in Washington, D.C. David conducts competitive procurements, rate reviews and benchmarking projects, particularly centering around the current generation of enterprise data networking services. He has assisted retailers, hospitality companies, energy firms and others in the procurement of multimillion-dollar enterprise data networks involving a range of MPLS and dedicated Internet solutions. David is also TC2's lead analyst on questions of telecommunications industry structure and strategic analysis. He specializes in analyzing the financial position of carriers, evaluating their stability and capability to invest in the areas and technologies most important to enterprise users. David became a TC2 consultant after serving as an enterprise data services analyst with the Yankee Group. For a number of years prior to that, he was a reporter, editor and columnist with Network World, where he covered such topics as the maturation of frame relay and ATM services, developments in enterprise voice equipment, and the impact of Federal Communications Commission actions on enterprise networks. David is currently the author and host of the popular blog, "TC2's David Rohde on Telecom," and is a regular speaker at industry conferences. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and Economics from Northwestern University.
Speaker - Alla Reznik, Director, Global Advanced Voice Services, Verizon
Alla Reznik is a director of product management of global advanced voice services for Verizon. In this position, she leads marketing and strategic positioning of the company's global Voice over IP (VoIP) and contact center services. Ms. Reznik has more than a decade of experience in the telecommunications field. She began her career with Verizon Business (formerly MCI) in 1997, leading product marketing and development efforts for ISDN, Access, DSL, Secure Gateway, IP VPN, Private Line and Optical services and, most recently, Ethernet, IP and VPLS. Before joining MCI, Ms. Reznik worked at AT&T International in Washington, DC in the capacity of Business Development manager where she promoted AT&T's business with foreign governments. Prior to starting her career in telecommunications, Ms. Reznik worked at the World Bank.
Moderator - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
For the past three years, the theme of Unified Communications has grown in importance, as it is the vanguard of a fundamental transition that is shaking up the enterprise communications marketplace: The industry is evolving from a focus on hardware to a focus on software - software architectures, software-based systems and services. The good news is that the inevitability of this transition is widely accepted. However, the bad news is that the promise of Unified Communications remains largely unfulfilled. Implementations of "true" UC, while growing, remain relatively small in number. There is still considerable confusion in the market about what UC is and what it isn't. And there are tough issues like interoperability that inhibit wider adoption and deployment. The rocky economic climate doesn't help matters either. This VoiceCon Summit will take examine the UC market from a variety of perspectives: How far along has the market really evolved? What are the issues facing both buyers and sellers as they adapt to this new regime? What obstacles need to be overcome as enterprises try to mesh UC with their existing network design and procurement procedures, network operations and organizations?
Panelist - Peter Greco, Director, Solution Management, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Peter Greco is US Director of Solution Management, OpenScape Unified Communications for Siemens Enterprise Communications. His responsibilities include the support for customers and field personnel, product input, marketing, sales strategy, and US product cycle management. Mr. Greco has held service, sales, and program marketing roles for Siemens, IBM and ROLM. Currently operating out of the Philadelphia area, Mr. Greco has been published in several periodicals and holds a Bachelor's Degree fro West Chester University.
Panelist - Marisa Viveros, VP Converged Communications and Mobility, IBM Global Technology
Panelist - Ross Daniels, Director Market Management, Collaboration Solutions, Cisco
Ross Daniels is a Director of Solutions Marketing for Unified Communications. In this capacity, Mr. Daniels is responsible for product positioning, solution messaging, and go-to-market activities for various aspects of Cisco's Unified Communications portfolio, with primary emphasis on Cisco Unified Contact Center, Voice and Unified Messaging, Web and Audio Conferencing, Mobile Unified Communications, and Presence/Enterprise IM solutions. Mr. Daniels joined Cisco as part of its November 1999 acquisition of WebLine Communications. While at WebLine, he held a variety of technical sales and marketing roles. Previous positions at Cisco include CTI Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, and Manager of Product Management for Cisco's enterprise and hosted contact center solutions. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Daniels spent several years in the business-to-business advertising industry. A regular speaker at industry events, Cisco events, and customer briefings, Mr. Daniels has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Harvard University and a Masters in Business Administration from Babson College.
Panelist - Steve Hardy, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Avaya
Panelist - Jack Jachner, VP of Alliances, Alcatel-Lucent
Dr. Jack Jachner is with the CTO office of the Enterprise Solutions Division at Alcatel-Lucent. Jack focuses on strategic alliances and technical strategy in Unified Communication and Collaboration. Jack has a Doctor of Science from MIT, and over 25 years in the communications industry.
Jim Burton is Founder and CXO of CT Link, LLC and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. Burton founded the consulting firm in 1989 to help clients in the converging voice, data and networking industries with strategic planning, mergers and acquisitions, strategic alliances and distribution issues. In the early 1990s, Burton recognized the challenges vendors and the channel faced as they developed and installed integrated voice/data products. He became the leading authority in the voice/data integration industry and is credited with "coining" the term computer-telephone integration (CTI). Burton helped companies including Microsoft and Intel enter the voice market and helped AT&T (now Avaya), Mitel, NEC, Nortel, Siemens and Toshiba with their CTI strategies. In the late 1990s, venture capitalists turned to Burton for help in evaluating potential investments in IP PBX start-ups. He went on to help these and other companies with strategic planning and partnering, including NBX (acquired by 3Com, Selsius (acquired by Cisco), ShoreTel and Sphere Communications. In the early 2000s, Burton began focusing on wireless services and technologies. In 2005 Burton started helping vendors with their Unified Communications strategy and in 2006, along with several colleagues, created a web site, UCStrategies.com, to provide information for enterprise customers and vendors.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
High Definition, high fidelity, broadband voice over IP has been possible for several years. The vendors push HD voice, but is it worth looking at for the enterprise? What does HD voice really deliver? What are the benefits? Does HD voice have an impact on the IP network? Are all the HD voice implementations interoperable? Do they follow a standard? What are the considerations for hard and softphones? These and other questions will be answered in this 60 minute session. KEY QUESTIONS: * What exactly is "high-definition" voice? Is there a standard definition, or does each vendor have its own definition? * Why would you choose HD over traditional voice? * What demands does HD voice place on the network, and what impact can it have on other applications? * What parts of a communications system must be involved in supporting HD voice—the endpoint? The call control? Other elements? * What cost premium can you expect to pay for HD voice? Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
Moderator/Speaker - Gary Audin, President, Delphi, Inc.
Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
Jeffrey Rodman has been at the forefront of audio and video communications for most of his career. Following a 1974 BSEE Cum Laude in electronic engineering from CSUN, he spent six years developing and enhancing video and test capabilities for military guided missile systems for Hughes Aircraft Company. During this time he also created a novel approach to sound synthesis that formed the foundation for his Master's thesis, and co-founded Specialty Video Systems to market digital video effects to the entertainment industry. In 1980, he joined Harris Video Systems where he became Director of Engineering, pioneering new digital video processing systems for broadcast and production applications. In 1984, Mr. Rodman was recruited to build a hardware engineering organization and implement a revolutionary architecture for the new startup PictureTel (then PicTel), building the foundation for a new generation of systems that transformed the industry, and continued as Director of Hardware Development through PictureTel's formative years. Mr. Rodman co-founded Polycom in 1990 and has been instrumental in the realization of Polycom's iconic products for unified voice, video, and network communications. Drawing from this diverse experience, and from his background as virtuoso pianist and composer, Rodman has developed a keen appreciation for the importance of clear, reliable vision and sound in human interaction, and the ways in which transparency in perception can be delivered in remote conferencing. He sees the industry move toward unified collaboration as an epochal change in the nature of human remote communications, one that presages dramatic enhancements in sound quality, reliability, and richness of features. Rodman has spoken and presented at numerous forums, and is delighted to be a continuing part of Polycom, where he is a strong champion of technologies and products that bring the best and clearest quality to users around the world.
Reactor Panelist - Alan Percy, Director, Market Development, AudioCodes
Mr. Percy is Director of Market Development at AudioCodes, a leading provider of Voice over IP Telephony products and enabling technology. In this role, Mr. Percy is responsible for identifying market trends and building relationships to foster new business opportunities. Mr. Percy joined AudioCodes in 2001 and brings over two decades of experience in the telecommunications, networking and wireless equipment industries. Mr. Percy is a frequent industry speaker and contributes to a number of industry journals and blogs.
Whether because of a best-of-breed strategy, mergers, acquisitions or a migration from either traditional TDM or a mixed TDM-IP environment to one that supports UC, enterprises typically have a complex mix of multiple telephony vendors and platforms. Adding to this complexity is a growing need to integrate voice systems with critical business applications like active directory, HR, ERP, etc. These environments are extremely expensive to manage and there is a growing realization that new management and administration tools are needed. This session will focus on best practices for managing and administrating complex telecom environments, and include a review of tools for provisioning, automation and reporting. DISCUSS THIS SESSION
Christopher May is Vice President of VOSS Solutions, North America, and is a co-founder of the company. He is responsible for all North America operations and he also oversees the corporate marketing function for VOSS. Christopher is an expert in the fields of Operational Support Systems (OSS) for the Telco and Broadband markets, with a specific focus in the area of VoIP, high-speed-data, and interactive digital video. Prior to co-founding VOSS, Christopher was a founding partner of Broadcentric Ltd, a specialist Digital Broadband 'convergent solutions' company. Christopher has 20 years experience with large, technology projects, including the launch of Australia's first DOCSIS broadband platform and the world's first commercial launch of standard's based digital satellite TV. Christopher has an MBA from Macquarie University and an Engineering Degree from the University of Sydney.
Phil brings strong leadership skills and sales management expertise gathered from his more than 14 years in the software technology industry. Prior to joining Unimax, Phil held various executive business management roles at leading technology companies, including SoftBrands, Inc. (formerly Fourth Shift) and Epicor. Most recently, he was responsible for developing a $100 million sales channel including more than 100 third-party sales representatives. Phil holds a B.S. degree in general business, sales and marketing from St. Cloud State University and is CPIM certified.
Moderator - David Yedwab, Partner, Market Strategy and Analytics Partners
David Yedwab is a Founding Partner in Market Strategy and Analytics Partners LLC. He is a seasoned technology marketing executive with over 25 years experience providing marketing, sales, technology and business strategy advice to many of the world's largest and most successful companies including - Cisco, AT&T, BellSouth, Apple, NTT, NEC, Nortel, Samsung and Siemens. His specialties are business and product strategy, distribution channel development, product marketing and competitive differentiation. Mr. Yedwab has appeared on CBS News 48 Hours, CNBC and Bloomberg Business Radio. He is often quoted in national business publications such as Fortune, USA Today, Investor's Business Daily and the Internet and telecommunications trade press. Prior to starting Market Strategy and Analytics Partners, Mr. Yedwab managed the Public and Private Networking practices of The Eastern Management Group. This has included engagements covering market and distribution requirements and strategies for next generation networks; marketing programs designed to help enterprise providers to increase their revenues and market shares; the implications of the business transformation driven by the Internet, broadband and mobile networks; the emergence of the e-commerce and its challenges and opportunities for private and public networks. Mr. Yedwab has also spent time working in the financial community developing trading networks. His activities were in conjunction with major securities, banking and financial services firms, both domestically and internationally. He has held business development, marketing and sales management positions with AT&T, including the management of a national account team and the development, negotiation and dissolution of business ventures. At Bell Laboratories, Mr. Yedwab worked as a data processing/data communication system designer, developer and performance analyst.
Whether an enterprise is early in its migration to IP Telephony or further along and now evaluating the concept of Unified Communications, it's not easy to build a credible business case. IP Telephony and, in particular, UC, are complex and involve numerous technologies, decision-makers and equipment, software and service providers. This tutorial will be divided into two segments: The first is devoted to IP Telephony businesses cases, the second will cover the UC business case. It will be based on IP Telephony cost data that has been gathered over the past five years from more than 800 companies that have implemented the technology, as well as real-world data from hundreds of IT decision makers on the newer UC products and technologies. This tutorial will cover the following questions: * How do companies build a business case around IP Telephony and Unified Communications? What are the key metrics? * What does it really cost to implement IP Telephony? What are the cost components of a UC business case? * What resources (internal and external) companies must devote to their VOIP and UC rollouts, per end-unit, per year segmented by rollout size and vendor. * What are some of the key pitfalls? Where did companies go wrong? * What are some compelling business case models for both IP Telephony and UC? Robin Gareiss is Executive Vice President and Senior Founding Partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research projects and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking, and branch-office technologies. Before joining Nemertes, Ms. Gareiss served as Senior News Editor of Information Week, and prior to that, she worked at Data Communications Magazine. Ms. Gareiss has a BS in journalism and a minor in education, with honors, from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Irwin Lazar is the Principal Analyst and Program Director for Unified Communications and Collaboration at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, 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 enterprise technologies including VoIP, Unified Communications, Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking and collaboration. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), Mr. Lazar is a columnist for No Jitter and Collaboration Loop. He is regular speaker at events Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar serves as the conference director for FutureNet (formerly MPLScon), the chair for Network World IT Roadmap Web 2.0 track, and is on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Instructor - Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Irwin Lazar is the Vice President for Communications Research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, 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, Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking, and collaboration. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Mr. Lazar is a columnist for No Jitter and Enterprise2Blog. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press. and is regular speaker at events such as Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar serves as the conference director for FutureNet (formerly MPLScon), and is on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Instructor - Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President & Sr. Founding Partner, Nemertes Research
Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research analysts and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors and carriers. She currently serves as chief financial officer, as well. For the past 17 years, Robin Gareiss has worked closely with hundreds of senior IT executives, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, including Interop, VoiceCon and Mobile Business Expo, and she is frequently quoted in publications, including Business Week, Entrepreneur magazine, ComputerWorld, and CIO magazine. She also writes the Branch Offices Best Practices column for Network World.
The IP Telephony System (IPTS) remains at the core of an enterprise communications network and is responsible for business critical functions and applications, including dial tone, station and trunk port connectivity, user feature implementations and networking. The architecture and design determines redundancy and resiliency capabilities necessary to satisfy business continuity objectives and future customer growth and expansion requirements. The dynamics of the IPTS market make it difficult to keep abreast of the many updates and new products from the leading system suppliers, thus the offering of this workshop. The workshop material will focus on the flagship IPTS offerings from the following system suppliers: * Alcatel-Lucent * Avaya * Cisco * Digium (Asterisk) * Aastra * Mitel * NEC * Nortel * Siemens Enterprise Communications Group * ShoreTel Topics to be covered include: * System design and topology * Capacity parameters (ports, call processing, traffic handling) * Common control and media gateway hardware elements * Redundancy and resiliency attributes * Networking capabilities, including SIP trunking and remote branches * Voice terminals, including desktop (telephone instruments and PC soft clients) and mobile * Application options, including contact center, messaging, and unified communications Workshop attendees will: * Increase your understanding of current generation enterprise communications system offerings. * Learn which IPTS best satisfies your enterprise design requirements in preparation for your next system purchase. * Ascertain which system best fulfills your organization business continuity, system networking, and/or future growth requirements. * Discover the primary strengths and weaknesses of the leading IPTS offerings before you buy. Allan Sulkin, president of TEQConsult Group, is known throughout the industry for his knowledge and expertise of enterprise communications solutions. He has three decades experience reviewing and analyzing PBX systems, presenting competitive PBX system analysis presentations to both customers and system suppliers. Sulkin was a longtime contributing editor for Business Communications Review, continues to contribute blog posts and articles to NoJitter.com, and authored the textbook PBX Systems for IP Telephony (McGraw-Hill Professional). Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
Instructor - Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group
Allan Sulkin is president and founder of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), a 22 year old independent management consultancy focused on the enterprise communications market. Sulkin has almost 30 years telecommunications industry experience, and is widely recognized as the leading IP telephony premises system product/market analyst. He was a Contributing Editor to Business Communications Review and continues in that role for www.NoJitter.com
Open Source PBXs have become a force in the enterprise communication market, with some estimates showing as much as 18% of stations shipped (for all size segments) may be open source. Clearly, this is an option that many enterprises are taking much more seriously than they might have expected to a few years ago. But does that mean open source should be a part of your next procurement, or at least included in RFIs and RFPs? To answer those questions, this workshop will look at both the market for open source systems, and the technology supporting them. In the first half of the workshop, you'll learn which are the major systems and offerings, how you go about getting started with open source, what benefits you can expect to gain, and what (if any) enterprise-grade features and functions you'll have to give up with open source. The second half of the workshop will feature a panel discussion expanding on these themes and featuring vendors and end users who can give you a real-world perspective on what to expect with open source. KEY QUESTIONS: * Why has open source PBX been growing in popularity? * How large can these systems scale, and can they support all the features and functions that enterprises get with proprietary systems? * Is open source PBX "free?" What costs are associated with researching, obtaining, customizing and deploying an open source PBX? * Can you deploy open source PBX as a subset of an enterprise communications environment that also runs proprietary systems? What are the pros and cons of doing this? * What level of post-deployment support and ongoing involvement in the open source community is required in order to ensure a successful implementation and manageable system?
Speaker - John Todd, Asterisk Open Source Community Director, Digium
John is the Asterisk Open Source Community Director for Digium. He comes from a background in startup voice-services companies with deep experience with Asterisk and open-source software for product and service delivery. Prior to the VoIP revolution was involved in some of the core ISP and co-location infrastructure companies on which the Internet first gained a foothold in the business and end-user world. He has worked with many enterprise and service provider networks in the implementation of IP-based networking and Asterisk solutions. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Moderator/Speaker - John Malone, The Eastern Management Group, President and CEO
Panelist - Jeremy Wadhams, Senior IT Engineer, Yahoo, Inc.
Jeremy Wadhams is the IT Architect for Yahoo!. He's focused the last decade of his IT career on VoIP and realtime collaboration. Jeremy led the team that installed Asterisk at Yahoo!, including writing new web tools for both IT and end users. Before that, he worked for various Cisco channel partners evangelizing, selling, and installing the CallManager product line. Jeremy's current projects include crafting a web-technology replacement for video conference control panels, and getting to know his newborn daughter, Valentine Grace.
Panelist - Danielle Deibler, Snr. Engineering Manager, Adobe Systems
Danielle Deibler works for Adobe Systems, investigating early-stage technology and business opportunities. Her current focus is the casual gaming space as it pertains to the Flash Platform. Deibler has over 17 years in the Internet infrastructure, software development, and networking arenas. Her primary area of focus in the last 7 years has been on building scalable real time collaboration platforms and applications. Previously, she's held senior leadership positions in software development, engineering, business development and product management for several early stage companies. She is also an avid gamer.
Panelist - David Poirier, Wide Area Network Administrator, Multnomah Education Service District
Voice messaging systems became part of the landscape because phones need to be answered whether or not the called party was available. But with presence, IM and related UC applications and capabilities, there are new ways to assess the value voice messaging and Unified Messaging do—or don't—deliver. This session will analyze the new options becoming available, and the different ways to calculate ROI. KEY QUESTIONS: *Are IP-PBXs needed for a voice mail to unified messaging migration? What's the best way and place to store messages? *Is end of life finally here for legacy voice mail systems? *What are new options for getting voice messaging, call answering and auto-attendant services? *Is it better to have voice mail built into the PBX software, or on separate servers? *What is the impact of speech auto-attendants on voice mail? Blair Pleasant is President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC, and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. She provides consulting and market research analysis on unified communications, unified messaging, and contact center markets and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. Prior to COMMfusion, Ms. Pleasant was Director of Communications Analysis for The PELORUS Group, a market research and consulting firm, and President of Lower Falls Consulting.
Kathy Heilmann is director of Unified Communications Portfolio Marketing. In this role she is responsible for marketing the OpenScape portfolio of large enterprise voice and unified communications solutions. Previously she was director of large enterprise application strategy in the office of the CTO. Heilmann joined Siemens in 1997 as a marketing manager. In her marketing capacity, Heilmann was responsible for the successful launch of unified messaging and contact center products, and played critical marketing roles in the launch of the HiPath, LifeWorks, and most recently, OpenScape UC Server. Prior to joining Siemens, Heilmann held the positions of product manager, project manager, and engineer at other leading technology firms. Additionally, she has been an entrepreneur, managing her own business specializing in Internet consulting and publishing. Heilmann holds a bachelor's degree in engineering and a master's degree in business administration, both from the University of California at Berkeley. Heilmann is also a licensed professional engineer in the state of California.
Andy Allison leads product management for Avaya's Unified Messaging portfolio. As a seasoned product manager, his role at Avaya over the last six years has focused on the transition of traditional voicemail technologies to advanced unified messaging and integrated unified communications experiences. Prior to Avaya, Andy was Director of Business Development at Solsoft, Inc. a security management software provider. With Solsoft he was an expatriate in France and England. He now resides at the base of the Rockies in Boulder, Colorado.
Panelist - Yaniv Livneh, CEO, T3 Telecom Software Inc.
Yaniv Livneh has been with the company since 1993. In 2004 he became the CEO and President of T3 Telecom Software. During his leadership as CEO, Mr. Livneh re-focused the company into a Voice over IP application provider and as a result, the company has realized a steady yearly increase in revenues. Prior to becoming the CEO, Mr. Livneh held engineering and sales positions within the company. Before joining the company Mr. Livneh was a member of the Israeli Defense Forces, specializing in communication technologies. Mr. Livneh has Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy from New York University.
Moderator - Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC
Blair Pleasant is President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC, and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. She provides consulting and market research analysis on unified communications, unified messaging, and contact center markets and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. Prior to COMMfusion, Ms. Pleasant was Director of Communications Analysis for The PELORUS Group, a market research and consulting firm, and President of Lower Falls Consulting.
Moderator - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting
Marty Parker is committed to advancement of Unified Communications (UC) to produce new benefits and efficiencies in enterprise communications and to stimulate and justify innovation in the business communications industry. Marty sees Unified Communications as transforming the highly manual, unmeasured, and relatively unpredictable world of telephony-based and e-mail-based communications into a software-assisted, coordinated, simplified, predictable process that will deliver high-value benefits to customers, to employees, and to the relevant enterprises. With even moderate attention to implementation and change management, UC can deliver the cost-saving and process-accelerating changes that deliver real, compelling, hard-dollar ROI. Marty is co-founder of UniComm Consulting, the industry's premier independent consulting firm providing strategy, planning and implementation support for enterprises in all industry segments. Marty is also co-founder of UCStrategies.com, the industry's leading forum for UC information and dialog. Marty created the workshop, Planning and Implementing Unified Communications, offered though BCR Training since 2006 and now available through Telecom + UC Training. Involved providing UC sessions at VoiceCon since 2006, Marty will be delivering the industry review, "UC Options: Who's Offering What?" as well as leading the deep-dive session, "Unified Communications Implementation." As a student of UC successes and case studies, Marty will moderate the important session, "Communications Enabled Apps in Action: Case Studies" at which customer executives will highlight their actual UC experiences. Marty bases is UC activities on his experience in sales, strategic planning, product line management, financial management and general management positions in both computing (IBM) and communications (ATT/Lucent/Avaya) firms, as well as with two venture funded firms and with a very large west-coast telecom interconnect firm in the 1980s.
What's a voice mashup, and why should you care? This session will explain how different application and services elements can be combined in an ad hoc manner by end users drawing upon enterprise resources, to create "mashups." We'll look at the uses for mashups, where the elements of a mashup come from, and how they can benefit end users and your enterprise. KEY QUESTIONS: * How do you get started with voice mashups? What elements will you need to purchase, and what existing elements in your network can be included? * What do you have to do to make elements available for mashups? * What's the users' interface for a voice mashup, and how do you provide it to them? * Do you need to maintain some control over what users do within a mashup-enabled Web Services environment? * Why should you do this? What can voice mashups do for your end users that can't be done another way?
Speaker - Marlon Machado, Product Manager, Sametime Platform & Solutions, IBM Software Group
A programmer by trade and a natural problem solver, Marlon started writing code for a living at the young age of 13. Being the nerd he's always been, he went on to major in Mechanical Engineering because of the robotics thing, and then in Computer Science and Mathematics (how geeky is that?)Then he went back to writing software in whatever language the customer wanted. Marlon joined IBM in 1996 as a programmer for the ISSC organization (now IBM Global Business Services)in Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked on various projects involving distributed architectures. In 1998Marlon joined the SanFrancisco? Technology Center in Austin, Texas. He later became a Senior IT Architect for IBM ISV & Developer Relations where he worked very closely with IBM's Business Partners in designing and bringing integrated solutions to market. Marlon joined the Lotus Software team in 2008 as Product Manager, Sametime Platform and Solutions. Marlon's responsibilities include positioning Sametime as a platform to enable industry and horizontal solutions, creating an ecosystem of offerings built in collaboration with customers and IBM Business Partners, and driving product strategy and requirements to extend the Sametime platform to support new business scenarios and utilization paradigms. Nothing out of this world.
Moderator/Speaker - Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Dan York is Director of Conversations at Voxeo Corporation heading up the company's communication through both traditional and new/social media. Previously, Dan served in Voxeo's Office of the CTO focused on analyzing/evaluating emerging technology, participating in industry standards bodies and addressing VoIP security issues. 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. Dan frequently 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 at DisruptiveTelephony.com and Voxeo's weblogs at blogs.voxeo.com
How do you go from being an enterprise that has a PBX and also has some completely separate videoconferencing deployments, to being an enterprise with a coherent strategy for integrating the 2? If you've started down this road, come share the pluses and minuses as you've experienced them, and if you haven't started yet, use this session as a way to get some tips.
Brent Kelly has written numerous articles and reports on Unified Communications, focusing on Microsoft, IBM, and telephony vendors layering UC solutions on top of their PBXs. He has spoken and taught seminars on Unified Communications and on implementing IP Rich Media Communications in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. He leads the Unified Communications practice group at Wainhouse Research.
You've talked to the vendors, exhibitors and analysts, so now join us on Wednesday afternoon when the Society of Telecommunications Consultants (STC) will be hosting an interactive discussion of the topics covered at the show during the preceding days. This informal follow-up talk is open to all and will be attended by STC members Don Van Doren, Michael Finneran, Robert Harris, Stephen Leaden and Marty Parker along with many other STC Consultants representing a wide array of communications technology expertise. So, bring your questions and conversations to talk of unbiased advice and opinions from the independent consultant's perspective. The Society of Telecommunications Consultants is an international organization of information and communications technology professionals who serve clients in business, industry, service organizations and government. For over 30 years STC consultants have delivered independent and ethical telecommunications expertise. This objective guidance and support enables clients of STC consultants to benefit from the efficient and effective use of information and communications technologies.
Moderator - Robert Harris, President, Communications Advantage, Inc.
Robert Lee Harris is the President of Communications Advantage, Inc. As a seasoned consultant, Robert brings both intuitive technical knowledge and solid management skills to consulting projects. Robert Harris and Communications Advantage have focused on TEM system and process evaluation since 2003 and have followed the evolution of these solutions from a niche set of products to the high ROI solutions that they are today. Robert Harris has contributed articles to Business Communications Review and NoJitter on subjects ranging from telecom and wireless cost management to future technology trends and speaks frequently on Telecom Expense management at industry conferences. Robert currently serves as Senior VP and Board Member of the Society of Telecommunications Consultants (STC).
In this session, a leading analyst will offer her assessment of the current state of the contact center market—how enterprises are continuing to migrate to IP and SIP-based systems even in this economy, and which vendors they're turning to in order to drive this migration. There will then be a roundtable discussion in which executives from the leading vendors in the market space react to the analyst assessment and offer their own views on where the market is headed, and how IP-based systems can make the contact center more cost-effective in a challenging economic environment. KEY QUESTIONS: * How has the economic downturn affected the migration to IP? What percentage of the new contact center systems being deployed is now SIP-based? * Where do the vendors stand in terms of market share and technology leadership? * Can the migration to IP and SIP be cost-justified either through network savings or potential increased sales or faster problem resolution? * How are media such as text/instant messaging, video and social networking applications like FaceBook and Twitter being incorporated into leading-edge contact centers, and what are the challenges and benefits of these new media types? * Is the contact center market in danger of being absorbed into other application areas, such as Unified Communications and Business Process Automation? Would this be a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker - Sheila McGee-Smith, President & Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics, L.L.C.
Sheila McGee-Smith, the founder of McGee-Smith Analytics, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant focused on the contact center and unified communications markets. She has a proven track record of accomplishment in new product development, competitive assessment, market research, and sales strategies for communications solutions and services. Ms. McGee-Smith works on a daily basis with both solution providers and enterprises. Her insight helps them develop strategies to meet the escalating demands of today's consumer and business customers. Ms. McGee-Smith has spent over twenty years in the telecommunications industry, including 12 years with analyst firm The PELORUS Group. Prior to her career as an industry analyst, Ms. McGee-Smith held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex and Dun & Bradstreet. Ms. McGee-Smith was awarded a bachelor's degree from Barnard College, Columbia University, majoring in psychology and an MBA with majors in marketing and management information systems from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Sheila is a regular contributor to the No Jitter information portal No Jitter at www.nojitter.com.
Panelist - Bill Jolicoeur, Product Manager, Contact Center Solutions, Avaya
Bill Jolicoeur started his contact center career with AT&T in 1989 as a national sales specialist and joined product management in 1993. At Lucent and then Avaya Bill brought to market various telephones and soft phones designed for in-office agents and remote agents. After two years working on an R&D Contact Center portfolio planning team and then in the CTO, Bill returned to product management where he delivered several major releases of multimedia contact center products. Bill currently manages the Avaya Call Center product line and is planning its future releases.
Panelist - Gretchen Hoffman, VP, Worldwide Field Marketing, Genesys Telecommunications
Gretchen Hoffman, VP Worldwide Field Marketing at Genesys Telecommunications, where she has worked for 7 years. . Gretchen's experience includes 25+ years of sales and marketing experience in software and hardware as well as other industries. She leads teams with proven results. Her marketing experience includes Informix where she ran channel marketing, Docent elearning where she was Director of Marketing, co-op and advertising agencies where she managed HP, AT&T, BF Goodrich, Kraft/General Foods, ChapStick—and in many cases developed the channel and consumer programs which became leading programs in the market. She has also been in Sales where she repeatedly won achievement awards. Gretchen even turned one company around through innovative development and marketing of line extensions.
Panelist - Ross Daniels, Director Market Management, Collaboration Solutions, Cisco
Ross Daniels is a Director of Solutions Marketing for Unified Communications. In this capacity, Mr. Daniels is responsible for product positioning, solution messaging, and go-to-market activities for various aspects of Cisco's Unified Communications portfolio, with primary emphasis on Cisco Unified Contact Center, Voice and Unified Messaging, Web and Audio Conferencing, Mobile Unified Communications, and Presence/Enterprise IM solutions. Mr. Daniels joined Cisco as part of its November 1999 acquisition of WebLine Communications. While at WebLine, he held a variety of technical sales and marketing roles. Previous positions at Cisco include CTI Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, and Manager of Product Management for Cisco's enterprise and hosted contact center solutions. Prior to joining Cisco, Mr. Daniels spent several years in the business-to-business advertising industry. A regular speaker at industry events, Cisco events, and customer briefings, Mr. Daniels has a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Harvard University and a Masters in Business Administration from Babson College.
Panelist - Joe Staples, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Interactive Intelligence
JOSEPH A. STAPLES serves as senior vice president of worldwide marketing for Interactive Intelligence. He oversees the global marketing efforts of the company's award winning contact center and IP communication product lines. Mr. Staples brings 25+ years of experience in technology and marketing to Interactive Intelligence, including specific assignments in the areas of computer telephony, unified messaging, mobile wireless, computer networking, and computer-based education.
Improved collaboration is one of the key benefits of next-generation communications technology. The range of systems and tools available for next-gen collaboration is vast—from ad hoc, Web-based social networking to large enterprise platforms for information sharing, integrated with communications platforms. In this session, we'll look at social networking and enterprise collaboration—where the two intersect, where they diverge, and what it means for the systems you'll deploy to help your workers collaborate more effectively and securely. KEY QUESTIONS: * Which Web-based social networking tools are seeing the most use among enterprise end users? How are they being used? * What security and network performance challenges do these Web 2.0 applications pose? What user interfaces are most commonly used for this type of collaboration? * Do you need to integrate Web 2.0-type applications into your internal network and communications/collaboration systems? What are the costs, benefits and risks of attempting to bring social networking in-house? * What media do you have to support in order to enable next-gen collaboration—IM, persistent chat, audioconferencing, video, others?
Speaker - Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
Irwin Lazar is the Vice President for Communications Research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, 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, Web 2.0 initiatives, social networking, and collaboration. A Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and sought-after speaker and author, Mr. Lazar is a columnist for No Jitter and Enterprise2Blog. He is a frequent resource for the business and trade press. and is regular speaker at events such as Interop, VoiceCon, and Enterprise 2.0. Mr. Lazar serves as the conference director for FutureNet (formerly MPLScon), and is on the advisory board for the Enterprise 2.0 conference.
Speaker - Dan York, Director of Conversations, Voxeo Corporation
Dan York is Director of Conversations at Voxeo Corporation heading up the company's communication through both traditional and new/social media. Previously, Dan served in Voxeo's Office of the CTO focused on analyzing/evaluating emerging technology, participating in industry standards bodies and addressing VoIP security issues. 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. Dan frequently 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 at DisruptiveTelephony.com and Voxeo's weblogs at blogs.voxeo.com
Reactor Panelist - Scott Mark, Enterprise Application Architect, Medtronic
Scott Mark is an Enterprise Application Architect at Medtronic. Scott advises business teams on the successful use of social media and collaboration tools to meet marketing and educational objectives. He chairs a cross-functional and cross-business Social Media Working Group that serves as a clearinghouse for sharing best practices and resources among disparate social media efforts. He was part of a small team that developed Social Media Usage Guidelines for all employees, and worked to have these approved as part of Global Information Protection policy. Scott's key area of interest is the transformative use of social media for physician and patient interaction, while maintaining compliance in a regulated industry.
Reactor Panelist - Tim Ryan, Network Manager, City College of San Francisco
This session will help you understand the latest approaches to providing E911 coverage for an IP Telephony-enabled enterprise. We'll examine the infrastructure you need to add to your deployment in order to ensure accuracy, resiliency and high-availability in your E911 coverage. We'll also look at related emergency-notification technologies aimed at pushing information out to end users in times of disaster or other crises. KEY QUESTIONS: * How have enterprises tackled the challenges of providing location-specific E911? * What cost will an E911 deployment across the enterprise add to an IP Telephony deployment? * What are the risks of a piecemeal E911 deployment? * How can you add emergency notification to your system to inform users of crises (e.g., school/workplace shootings, natural disasters, etc.)
Speaker - Lev Deich, Director, ConneXon/911 Enable
Lev Deich has been part of 911 Enable since its inception in 2005 and currently serves as its Director, responsible for day-to-day operations and ongoing business development. Prior to 911 Enable, Lev had a distinguished career with Ericsson where he held various engineering and management positions in the U.S. and Europe. Lev has over 11 years of datacom and telecom experience, including managing joint software development projects with large enterprises such as Juniper Networks and Advanced Computer Communication. Lev holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Concordia University, where he graduated with distinct honors.
Speaker - Nicholas Maier, Senior Vice President, RedSky Technologies, Inc.
Nicholas (Nick) Maier, SVP, Marketing and Channel Development - Mr. Maier is a senior executive with over 15 years in telecommunications marketing, product development and channel development. In his current role, Mr. Maier is responsible for marketing, the product roadmap for RedSky's enterprise software products and its channel relationships with OEMs, resellers and distributors. Mr. Maier has served in the past as co-chairman of the Avaya DevConnect Advisory Council that represents Avaya ISVs and he is active in the Developer programs of Nortel and Cisco. From 1995 to 2000, Mr. Maier was Vice President of OEM Sales for Plantronics, the leading provider of hands-free communications devices. From 1983 to 1993, Mr. Maier was a senior sales and operations executive for Solitec, Inc., a diversified semiconductor equipment company in the Silicon Valley.
Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
Does Microsoft Office Communications Server Release 2 represent a major step forward for Microsoft in terms of supporting voice functionality that approaches the level we expect from legacy PBXs? Does OCS R2 perform up to enterprise levels of expectations? And how do other vendors' UC capabilities stack up to OCS's? In this session, a representative of a leading test lab will let you in on their latest findings. KEY QUESTIONS: * Does OCS Release 2 support a critical mass of traditional telephony features, and does it do so as well as legacy platforms? * Can OCS support mission-critical telephony needs at scale? * How do competing vendors' UC interfaces and applications compare with those of desktop vendors like Microsoft? * What areas of performance and feature/functionality should buyers pay the most attention to when evaluating whether vendor UC products work as advertised?
Rob Smithers is President and CEO of Miercom, a leading network product testing firm founded in 1988. Headquartered in central New Jersey, Miercom offers the industry more than two decades of experience in VoIP and convergence technologies, and pioneered methodologies for the assessment of VoIP and Unified Communications products. Rob also directs Miercom's new business development for emerging industries such as virtualization, green endeavors and the latest switching technologies. Miercom is the test lab for several leading publications and also offers certification programs that include Certified Green, Performance Verified and Certified Secure. Test results from the lab have been featured among others in NoJitter, Network World, Internet Telephony, and xchange magazines. He began his career working with test programs for sensors and later networking products. He has an electrical engineering degree from Lehigh University and serves as a reserve officer for U.S. Army Civil Affairs. Leveraging his practical expertise in product evaluations and conducting risk assessments, Rob takes a hands on approach to help clients find best-in-class solutions for problems and to protect their infrastructure. He offers strategic consulting for companies wishing to build fault tolerant, state-of-the art networks.
It seems as if the whole IT industry has its collective head in the "cloud" these days. Cloud Computing is all the rage and is being portrayed as the technical silver bullet to just about any IT-related problem. To be sure, the idea of reducing IT expenditures and headcount sounds compelling, particularly in tough economic times. But where - and how -- does enterprise communications fit within the emerging framework for Cloud Computing? Does it portend a new set of options for delivering and managing voice, video and data communications, or is Cloud Computing for communications not much more than Centrex dressed up in 21st century buzzwords? Does the undeniable trend toward more mobile communications capabilities create the foundation for bringing together communications and Cloud Computing, or is it just the next iteration of heretofore unsuccessful initiatives like Application Service Providers (ASPs)? This VoiceCon Summit will examine the promise, today's realities and the possible future scenarios for marrying enterprise communications with Cloud Computing. You'll hear a variety of viewpoints and have the opportunity to ask your questions.
Greg leads Ribbit's business in the Enterprise Applications space with responsibility for sales, business development, marketing, and product management. He joined Ribbit in March, 2007 as an early team member to start Ribbit's enterprise business in the Salesforce.com ecosystem and has since developed additional market entry partnerships with Oracle, and BT Business in the UK. The Ribbit for Salesforce service launched commercially in May, 2008 and has won significant recognition, including Best Mobile App of 2008 for Salesforce.com, and TMC Net Communications Solution of the Year 2008. Greg joined Ribbit from Polycom where he was Senior Director of Product Management and New Business for Polycom's Voice Division which tripled annual revenues to nearly $200m during his tenure. Prior to Polycom, Greg consulted for technology companies including Electronic Ink and Sprint PCS, and held senior product management roles at Polaroid bringing new imaging products to market worldwide. He holds a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College, a master's degree in engineering from Harvard University, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Panelist - Chris Moore, Senior Product Manager, Skype for Business
Panelist - Joe Weinman, Strategy and Business Development VP, AT&T
Joe Weinman leads global portfolio strategy and business development for AT&T Business Solutions, which serves business customers ranging from small offices to large global enterprises, wholesale customers, systems integrators, and local, state, and federal government. AT&T (www.att.com) is the world's largest telecommunications and information technology firm as of YE08, with US$124.0 billion in revenue. A 29-year veteran of the company, a prolific inventor and author, and frequent global keynote speaker, he has held a variety of executive positions of increasing responsibility spanning R&D at AT&T Bell Laboratories, marketing, sales, product management, engineering and operations, and corporate strategy and business development. He has a BS and MS in Computer Science from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin - Madison respectively, and has completed Executive Education at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. Mr. Weinman has been awarded 11 U.S. and international patents in a broad variety of technologies. He is also a recipient of the AT&T Architecture Award, the AT&T Patent Achievement Award, and multiple AT&T Distinguished Speaker Awards. He has keynoted, MC'd, presented, and been a panelist at numerous analyst, vendor, publisher, industry, university, and trade association events on five continents. He has had a variety of articles and talks published in the print and/or on-line editions of The New York Times, Business Week, Fortune, CNN, Money, Business Communications Review, Information Week, GigaOM, Salon, the ACM, the IEEE, CIO Magazine, and the AT&T Technical Journal. He has also appeared on U.S., European, and pan-Asian broadcast television, been quoted in the U.S. and international print and on-line media, and appears in a number of on-line videos. Links to articles, videos, and simulation tools may be found at http://www.joeweinman.com/
Panelist - James Urquhart, Marketing Manager, Data Center Solutions, Cisco
Moderator - Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, leads Yankee Group's Global Enterprise and Consumer Research Kerravala's team analyzes the impact of connectivity transformation on the Anywhere Consumer and the Anywhere Enterprise, and probes the changes to behaviors, motivations and technologies that result. Kerravala manages the research and consulting agenda that enables clients to meet the demands of the global connectivity revolution. Kerravala's expertise involves working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading infrastructure consulting firm. Earlier, he was the vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic brokerage firm, deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, where he was responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Kerravala holds a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Moderator - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
As companies spread out across towns, states, nations and the globe, the challenges of interconnecting locations becomes more complex. And with more employees working from home and on the road, the question of which systems, services and personal devices becomes more challenging. There are new options for centralizing core communications facilities with distributed subnetworks, and the options for mobile communications are expanding almost daily. This session will review the newest options for connecting smaller/ branch locations and at-home and mobile workers. KEY QUESTIONS: * What design configurations make the most sense for distributed network architectures? * What's the emphasis on current developments--more features, more security, more availability? * What are the real capabilities for ensuring system reliability, security and back-up? * What's the pricing trend? * Should you be thinking about on-premise equipment or using "the cloud"?
Speaker - Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President & Sr. Founding Partner, Nemertes Research
Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner for Nemertes Research, where she oversees research analysts and direction, conducts strategic seminars, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors and carriers. She currently serves as chief financial officer, as well. For the past 17 years, Robin Gareiss has worked closely with hundreds of senior IT executives, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. Ms. Gareiss is a widely recognized expert in voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, carrier services, IP networking and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, including Interop, VoiceCon and Mobile Business Expo, and she is frequently quoted in publications, including Business Week, Entrepreneur magazine, ComputerWorld, and CIO magazine. She also writes the Branch Offices Best Practices column for Network World.
Reactor Panelist - Ray Stendall, Solution Architect, Alcatel-Lucent
At the conclusion of each VoiceCon, we ask leading analysts to join VoiceCon co-chairs Fred Knight and Eric Krapf to summarize what they learned during the Conference. The Locknote will analyze progress in the migration to IP Telephony and Unified Communications, vendor positioning and market strategies, and examine whether the payoffs from new technologies are being realized. The panelists draw on their experience and what they've seen and heard during the conference, and they'll take your questions.
Panelist - Eric Krapf, Program Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Editor, No Jitter
Eric Krapf is co-chair of the VoiceCon events, helping to set program content and direction for the leading conference events in the enterprise IP-telephony/convergence/Unified Communications marketplace. In addition, Krapf serves as editor & lead blogger for the website No Jitter, CMP Media's online community for news and analysis of the enterprise convergence/Unified Communications industry. He is also responsible for electronic content including webcasts and e-newsletters. From 1996 to 2004, Krapf was managing editor of Business Communications Review magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.
Panelist - Zeus Kerravala, SVP Enterprise Research, The Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, leads Yankee Group's Global Enterprise and Consumer Research Kerravala's team analyzes the impact of connectivity transformation on the Anywhere Consumer and the Anywhere Enterprise, and probes the changes to behaviors, motivations and technologies that result. Kerravala manages the research and consulting agenda that enables clients to meet the demands of the global connectivity revolution. Kerravala's expertise involves working with customers to solve their business issues through the deployment of infrastructure technology. Before Yankee Group, Kerravala was a senior engineer and technical project manager for Greenwich Technology Partners, a leading infrastructure consulting firm. Earlier, he was the vice president of IT for Ferris, Baker Watts, a mid-Atlantic brokerage firm, deploying corporate-wide technical solutions to support the firm's business units. Kerravala was also an engineer and technical project manager for Alex. Brown & Sons, where he was responsible for the technology related to the equity trading desks. Kerravala holds a B.S. degree in physics and mathematics from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
Gary Audin has more than 40 years of computer, communications and security experience. He has planned, designed, specified, implemented and operated data, LAN and telephone networks. These have included local area, national and international networks as well as VoIP and IP convergent networks in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Caribbean and Asia. He has advised domestic and international venture capital and investment bankers in communications, VoIP, and microprocessor technologies. Gary Audin's many articles can be found on www.webtorials.com and www.acuta.org. He writes a weekly blog on communications subjects that can be found at www.nojitter.com and publishes technical tips at www.SearchTelecom.com and www.SearchUnifiedCommunications.com.
Panelist - Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC
Blair Pleasant is President & Principal Analyst of COMMfusion LLC, and Co-Founder of UCStrategies.com. She provides consulting and market research analysis on unified communications, unified messaging, and contact center markets and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. Prior to COMMfusion, Ms. Pleasant was Director of Communications Analysis for The PELORUS Group, a market research and consulting firm, and President of Lower Falls Consulting.
John Bartlett John Bartlett is a leading authority on real-time traffic, application performance and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. He specializes in helping enterprises manage voice, video and data application performance. Recent work has focused on designing global networks to best support video conferencing and telepresence systems. John has 32 years of experience in the semiconductor, computer and communications fields in marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing and consulting roles. He has contributed to microprocessor, computer and network equipment design for over 40 products. He has been consulting since 1996. Prior to working as a consultant, John was a founder and VP of Engineering and Manufacturing at Agile Networks, now part of Lucent Technologies. Under his leadership, the company designed and built a high performance Ethernet switch implementing VLANs, and one of the first commercial ATM switches. Both products were successfully introduced to the market and the firm became profitable before it was acquired. Mr. Bartlett also served on the IEEE 802.1 committee during this period, and contributed to the development of the IEEE 802.1P and IEEE 802.1Q standards (priority and VLANs.) John is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, where he received the Dartmouth Society of Engineers Annual Prize for the quality of his thesis presentation. John is co-owner of a patent in shared memory multiprocessor design.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon, Publisher, No Jitter
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of VoiceCon, and the publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred was part of the team that launched the VoiceCon Conference in 1990. He served as Program Chairman through 2003 when he also became VoiceCon General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon has grown into the leading event for enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising two major conferences - VoiceCon Orlando and VoiceCon San Francisco - the VoiceCon Webinar series and two e-newsletters -VoiceCon eNews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly. From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. During that period, he covered the tumultuous changes that dramatically changed the industry. Under his stewardship, BCR received numerous awards from industry and publishing groups and associations. In December 2007, BCR magazine ceased publication and the editorial product shifted to the Web with the creation of a new website - NoJitter.com. Fred managed the organization's migration from print to electronic publishing and serves as publisher of NoJitter.com. Fred earned his BA in journalism at the University of Minnesota and has a Master's Degree in public administration from The Maxwell School, Syracuse University.
