IT Conference Overview

Allan is the Senior Marketing Manager for Unified Communications at Avaya. While he resides in Canada, his effectiveness in his global role is a testament to the application of Unified Communications solutions. His marketing, product management, and business development career has spanned 20+ years dealing with the planning and application of voice, data, and information systems to support the needs of business with particular focus on employee productivity and customer service. His applications focus has included: unified communications, messaging, IVR, contact center, CTI, voice over IP, and remote data access. Prior to joining Avaya (via Octel and Lucent) in 1998, Allan led marketing and business development teams at two mid sized organizations entering new stages of growth, which followed his applications marketing tenure at Nortel. Allan holds an MBA in Information Systems (McMaster University) and an Honors BA in Economics and Psychology (York University). Next to family activities with his 11-year old twin girls, his favorite pass times include playing golf and ice hockey.

Paul McMillan has over 20 years of experience in the design, implementation, and management of large scale voice, video, and IP networks. He brings extensive experience across Military, Government, and Commercial markets. He joined Siemens Communications in 1996 to assist in establishing the IP networking business in the U.S. market. He has held subsequent positions in Network engineering, Engineering management, and new technology introduction. In his current role, Paul is tasked with developing the long term UC technical vision and strategy for Siemens Global customer base.

Steve Guthrie has spent the past decade in the networking and telephony markets as an active participant in the emergence of LANs, WANs and IP technologies and most recently with unified communications such as IP voice, video, presence and messaging. As the director of product marketing for CA's Network and Voice Management Solution, which includes the eHealth performance manager, SPECTRUM fault manager, and eHealth for Voice phone system manager offerings, Guthrie is responsible for understanding how enterprises, public-sector agencies, telcos and managed service providers use network and voice management solutions and for communicating these experiences and industry best practices to help other organizations optimize their converged network investments and achieve high end-user satisfaction. Additionally, he works in conjunction with product management to understand the needs of large enterprises, telcos and MSPs and define solutions that span these customers' existing networks as well as the networks they are building to support the fast-growing demand for IP services for voice, video and data. Prior to joining CA, Inc., Guthrie was director of global product marketing for Integrated Research. of Sydney, Australia, which develops and sells the PROGNOSIS IP telephony management software solution for large enterprises and managed service providers. Prior to this, he was vice president of marketing at Xelor Software, a start-up based in the Boston area that was focused on solving new and complex business problems associated with time-sensitive, real-time IP communications contending for valuable and expensive bandwidth with data-centric applications. Prior to his appointment at Xelor, Guthrie was director of marketing at Pingtel, where he was recognized for his role in making the Pingtel phone a ubiquitous symbol of IP telephony and SIP-based communications.

Terry Slattery is the founder of Netcordia, inventor of NetMRI, and has been a successful technology innovator in networking during the past 20 years. He has a long history of network consulting and design work, including some of the first Cisco consulting and training on the east coast. As a consultant to Cisco, he led the development of the current Cisco IOS command line interface. Prior to Netcordia, Terry founded Chesapeake Computer Consultants, which became a Cisco premier training and consulting partner. At Chesapeake, he co-invented and patented the v-LAB system to provide hands-on access to real hardware for the hands-on component of internetwork training classes. Terry co-authored the successful McGraw-Hill text "Advanced IP Routing in Cisco Networks," is the second CCIE (#1026) awarded, and is a sought after industry speaker and advisor. As CTO at Netcordia, he is working with other industry experts to design network analysis rules and to identify ways to help network engineers improve their networks.

Tony Byrne is founder of CMS Watch (CMS Watch), a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates content technologies on behalf of solutions buyers. Tony was the lead analyst on the CMS Watch Enterprise Social Software Report 2008 which evaluates 20 Social Software vendors head-to-head against business and technical criteria.

J.B. Holston - CEO and President: Holston has run a wide range of technology and media enterprises over the last two decades. As President of Ziff Davis International, Holston managed Ziff Davis' operations across more than 100 countries, and launched Yahoo! Europe. He was part of the senior management team that led the successful LBO of ZD by Forstmann, Little, and subsequent sale to Softbank. Since selling his last technology start-up, Holston has helped create a wide range of for-profit and not-for-profit entities, including Media-x at Stanford, among several others. After receiving a BA in creative writing from Stanford in 1979, he taught English at Phillips Academy, worked as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, studied and wrote in Paris, France, then worked in strategic planning for NBC and RCA. J.B. received his MBA from Stanford in 1986, then worked on Jack Welch's staff at GE before moving back to NBC where for five years he was responsible for strategic planning and NBC's international operations.

Umberto Milletti is the cofounder and CEO of InsideView, the pioneering business search & intelligence service. Umberto has been a thought leader in the convergence of technology and content for the last 10 years. In the mid-90s he helped create a new way of learning, now called e-learning, where relevant instructions is delivered to students over the Internet. Beginning in 1996, as an executive and co-founder of DigitalThink, he also designed and built one of the first multi-tenant Software-As-A-Service platforms to deliver and track learning for millions of adult students each year. Umberto helped lead DigitalThink to a successful IPO, growing annual revenues to $60 million, and ultimately to its sale to Convergys in 2004. Even when he's not busy changing the world, you are likely to find Umberto moving quickly, either on a race track where he competes in auto racing, or on a bicycle racing up a hill, or playing sports with his two boys. Umberto holds a B.S., summa cum laude, in Electrical Engineering from Tufts University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California-Berkeley.