| Wednesday, September 17 |
| 11:00 am–12:00 pm |
Conference Sessions
The Future of the Voice Endpoint: Telephones, Softphones and MobilesWhat is driving enterprises to deploy PC- and PDA-based softphones today, and what are the prospects for these mobile and/or converged devices eliminating the need to buy single-function desktop telephones? What are the arguments for and against eliminating the desk phone, at least for knowledge workers? Moderator - Allan Sulkin, President, TEQConsult Group Allan Sulkin, founder and president of TEQConsult Group (www.teqconsult.com), is widely recognized as the foremost enterprise communications market analyst. His consulting practice provides a variety of strategic planning and marketing services to the industry's leading system suppliers. Sulkin is the author of PBX Systems for IP Telephony (McGraw Hill), was a contributing editor to Business Communications Review for almost two decades and is currently a contributing editor to www.nojitter.com. He can be contacted at amsulkin @aol.com
Speaker - Allan Mendelsohn, Senior Manager, Unified Communications Product Marketing , Avaya 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.
Speaker - James Stark, Technical Product Manager, Office Communications Server, Microsoft
Speaker - Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy, Siemens Communications
|
| 1:30 pm–2:30 pm |
Conference Sessions
Troubleshooting Converged NetworksAs IP telephony deployments scale up from the pilot stage to enterprise-wide implementations, it becomes more challenging to manage them and keep them running. This session helps the audience understand common sources of problems, and how to detect and fix them. Moderator - Eric Krapf, Editor, TechWeb Eric Krapf was named editor of Business Communications Review at the beginning of 2004, after serving as the magazine's managing editor since 1996. As editor, he is responsible for all magazine content and production, as well as content for BCR's electronic publishing endeavors. Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor at 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 - Steven Guthrie, Director, Product Marketing, CA 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.
Speaker - Terry Slattery, Founder and CTO, Netcordia 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.
| | Thursday, September 18 |
|
| 10:15 am–11:15 am |
Conference Sessions
Introduction to Unified CommunicationsThis session explains the basic concepts of Unified Communications (UC), including communications enabled business processes; multimedia collaboration; systems integration in UC; and the interrelationship of UC and contact center technologies. Speaker - Don Van Doren, UniComm Consulting Don Van Doren is a principal of UniComm Consulting, an independent consulting firm he founded with Marty Parker. The firm focuses exclusively on unified communications. It helps clients to understand the potential for UC in their business, to develop strategies appropriate for their goals and opportunities, to identify specific applications and associated ROI, to help identify appropriate supplier partners, and to assist with implementation, including project management, change leadership, and metrics. In addition to his work on client projects and helping manage the firm, Don writes articles and columns and speaks frequently at industry conferences. Don is also president of Vanguard Communications, another consulting firm which helps clients plan, design, and implement innovative contact center technology and processes. He is a co-founder of UCStrategies.com. Before founding Vanguard, Don held management positions in several systems integration firms. He has an undergraduate degree from Yale University and an MBA from the University of Michigan. Contact Don at 973-229-7185 or at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com. Visit his companies' websites at www.unicommconsulting.com and www.vanguard.net.
|
| 11:30 am–12:30 pm |
Conference Sessions
|
| 2:00 pm–3:00 pm |
Conference Sessions
Unified Communications: Results from the Test LabThis session will provide a detailed report on hands-on testing of some of the leading vendor UC packages, showing how well these systems perform and where there is still a need for improvement. Speaker - Juan Colmenares, Analyst and Senior Testing Engineer, Miercom
|
|