RFP Sessions

Monday, March 18
2:00 PM – 5:00 PM	Enterprise Communications Platform: IP Telephony/UC RFP - Location: Sun D The IP Telephony/UC RFP describes a domestically headquartered company with two branch locations and a number of mobile workers. This session present solutions from leading UC providers covering each … More ▶ Speaker/Moderator - Dave Stein, Principal, Stein Technology Consulting Group Panelist - Robert McMaher, Consulting System Engineer, Avaya Panelist - Stephen Brown, Cloud Technologist, Mitel Stephen has over 20 years of experience in the network and telecommunications industry. He is currently serving as Mitel's Vice President of U.S. Systems Engineering where his team of over 60 professionals provide consultative design and engineering support for Mitel’s complete product and applications portfolio to Mitel’s business partners and U.S.-based sales force. Since joining Mitel in 1996, he has served in many roles ranging from technical support, pre-sales engineering, business development and strategic alliance management where he has consistently contributed to optimizing performance levels, driving business growth, facilitating key alliances, and defining and implementing strategic technology driven solutions. Stephen began his career in communications in 1990 after a three year commitment to the U.S. Army. You can view his public profile on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/tostephenbrown and follow him on twitter stephenbrown301 Panelist - Peter Greco, Director, Strategic Solutions, Siemens Enterprise Communications Peter Greco is Director of Strategic Solutions Support for Siemens Enterprise Communications. His responsibilities include the market strategy and field support for OpenScape Unified Communications solutions in North America. Mr. Greco has spent 30 years in the communications industry with Siemens, IBM, and ROLM holding positions, in operations, sales, marketing and management. Mr Greco lives in the Philadelphia area. He has been published in several periodicals and holds an honors Degree from West Chester University. Panelist - Jack Jachner, VP Business Development OpenTouch, Alcatel-Lucent Dr. Jack Jachner brings more than 20 years of telecommunications research and development experience to his current position at Alcatel-Lucent in business development for OpenTouch in North America. In his current role, Dr. Jachner is responsible for directions and partnerships to enable collaborative conversations via an award winning platform like OpenTouch. Jack has served in a variety of positions in Alcatel then Alcatel-Lucent, including operational management in the Enterprise Communication Server business unit, in the Research and Innovation and in the CTO. Previously, Dr. Jachner has held positions at Tellabs, the Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation (AAEC), and Bell Northern Research. Jack holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, and a Master of Science degree in data networking and Doctor of Science degree in digital signal processing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jack is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and holds a number of patents in the area of communication applications. Panelist - Pat Henkle, Director, Product Management, NEC Corporation As Director of Product Line Management, Pat is responsible for the UNIVERGE 3C product line, the latest generation of Unified Communications software from NEC. Prior to NEC, Pat led the product management team at Sphere Communications, which was acquired by NEC. Sphere Communications was the developer of Sphericall a fully software based IP PBX and Unified communications product. Sphere Communications was awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for the packet based PBX. Prior to Sphere Communications, Pat was responsible for managing a global portfolio of carrier class multi-media access gateways for Internet Access and VoIP at 3Com Corporation and US Robotics Corporation (acquired by 3Com). Before joining US Robotics, Pat held a variety of positions ranging from software development, technical sales engineering and product management at Ameritech Corporation where his expertise involved the blending of broadband networking technologies and networked software applications for automated workflow and decision support systems. Pat graduated from the University of Illinois – Chicago with a Bachelors of Science in Quantitative Methods and Information Decision Sciences. He lives in Chicago, Illinois with his wife Kim and their three children. Panelist - Mike Roussey, Product Manager, Cisco Mike is a Product Manager in the Collaboration Infrastructure Business Unit at Cisco. Mike’s focus at Cisco is on making video an integral component of Cisco’s collaboration solution. In his current role, Mike manages the Cisco Video Communication Server (VCS) product line. This includes working very closely with the UC Manager team in direct support of making video pervasive throughout the Cisco UC solution. Prior to Cisco, Mike worked for Tandberg, which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. At Tandberg Mike held several roles in Product Management and Product Marketing, all of which focused on video infrastructure, personal video and applications. Mike holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University. Mike enjoys tennis, basketball, and keeping up on current events. He resides in the Washington, DC area with his wife and two sons.
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Tuesday, March 19
2:30 PM – 5:30 PM	Cloud-Based UC Services RFP - Location: Osceola B This workshop starts with the simple question: If an enterprise wanted to eliminate all or most of its premises-based communications equipment and deploy a fully loaded unified communications solution… More ▶ Speaker/Moderator - Brent Kelly, President / Vice President and Principal Analyst, KelCor, Inc. / Constellation Research Dr. Brent Kelly is President for KelCor, Inc. and Vice President and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research, Inc., focusing on the intersecting technologies comprising unified communications, social business, cloud services, mobility, and video. Dr. Kelly provides strategy and counsel to key Constellation client types: Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, investment analysts, VCs, technology policy executives, sell side firms and technology buyers. Prior to joining Constellation, Dr. Kelly served for ten years as a partner at Wainhouse Research where he was the primary author of most of the firm’s unified communications reports and forecasts. Dr. Kelly has experience as the Vice President of Marketing for Sorenson Vision, an early innovator in the IP communications space, and he has served as the chief executive in a privately held manufacturing company. Prior to this, Dr. Kelly was part of the team at Schlumberger that built the devices Intel used to test their Pentium microprocessors. He also led teams developing real-time data acquisition and control systems, and adaptive intelligent design systems in several Schlumberger Oil Field services companies including 4 1/2 years working in France. He has worked as a research engineer for Conoco, implementing more efficient mathematical convergence methods for oil reservoir simulators, and as a process engineer for Monsanto. Dr. Kelly is a regular presenter at Enterprise Connect (formerly VoiceCon), the communications industry trade show where his well respected half-day tutorials have covered topics such as hosted and managed unified communications services, Microsoft Office Communications Server technical deep dives, and IBM Lotus Sametime architectural reviews. Dr. Kelly has authored articles for Business Communications Review Magazine, NoJitter.com, and he has also taught seminars in North America, Europe, Australia, and South America. Dr. Kelly has a Ph.D. in engineering from Texas A&M University specializing in thermodynamics and a B.S. in engineering from Brigham Young University. He is an elected official serving on the city council in his community. Panelist - Huw Rees, Vice President of Business Development, 8x8, Inc. Huw Rees serves as 8x8's Vice President of Business Development and was previously Chief Executive Officer of Centile, Inc., a former subsidiary of 8x8 where he led the development of the hosted PBX technology from 1999 to 2004. Rees was responsible for the change in 8x8's marketing and sales away from an OEM approach to a focus on end-users including both consumers and small businesses for hosted, cloud based communications services. He has been closely involved with telecommunications technology for over 25 years, beginning with Marconi PLC in 1985, where he opened and managed their Western US sales office. He has also held management roles with Plessey Inc., and with Mitel Corporation. Rees received a B.Sc. (Hons) from the University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and an MBA from the University of LaVerne. Panelist - Paul McMillan, Director Enterprise Technical Solution Engineering, SED North America, Siemens Enterprise Communications Paul McMillan brings over 20 years of experience in the design, implementation, and management of large, complex realtime 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 North American market. He has held subsequent positions in Network engineering, Engineering management, New platform introduction, Chief Technology office, Marketing, and Global Portfolio Management. Paul is a graduate of the Signal Officers Advanced Course and the Army Information Systems Staff Officer Course. In his current role, Paul oversees the technical sales engineering team supporting our large Enterprise customers across North America. Panelist - Chris Hurley, Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategic Alliances, Thinking Phone Networks Chris Hurley is a serial entrepreneur and executive with experience building and growing companies for over 20 years. His professional experience ranges from the earliest stage startup to Fortune 150 companies. At Thinking Phone Networks, Chris is responsible for developing strategic relationships with the leading global technology companies and service providers. Prior to Thinking Phone Networks, he was in Sun Microsystems’ Corporate Development group where he was responsible for managing global relationships with Cisco, EMC, Hitachi, LSI, and Huawei that delivered over $1 billion in revenue to Sun. He also supported M&A activities and divestitures for the company's Storage business unit. He has also served as Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Sanbolic, a software development company specializing in file systems technologies, and Director of Sales at Breakaway Solutions, an ASP hosting company that was the precursor to cloud computing. Prior to Breakaway Solutions, Chris was the founder and CEO of The Network Factory, a computer networking consultancy and Boston Interactive Systems, a database developer consultancy. Both firms provided IT consulting services to major corporations in New England. Chris attended University of Massachusetts Boston. Panelist - Karen Erasmi, UCCaaS Product Manager, Verizon Enterprise Solutions Karen Erasmi is a product manager at Verizon, with responsibility for developing and deploying Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service solutions globally. Karen has over 25 years of data network and IP Telephony design, implementation and management experience including system engineering positions at Digital Equipment Corporation and Wellfleet/Bay Networks/Nortel Networks prior to joining Verizon as a solution architect in 2002. Panelist - Phillip Liu, Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications, 8x8 Phillip Liu is a Sr. Product Manager for Unified Communications at 8x8, Inc. He manages desktop and mobile cloud applications incorporating softphone, visual voicemail, IM/presence, web/video conferencing and call recording. Phillip has 20 years of experience developing enterprise software for the communications, healthcare and finance industries. Previously he managed the WebEx developer platform at Cisco Systems and built healthcare web applications at WebMD. Phillip began his career developing financial trading systems for the UBS Investment Bank and Citigroup. Phillip holds an M.B.A. from the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. He holds a patent on the technology to launch web conferences from IP phones. Panelist - Robin Alkein, Sr. Sales Engineer, ShoreTel Robin Alkein is a Sr. Sales Engineer with ShoreTel’s Cloud Division. He has over 15 years’ experience in telecommunications and has held network engineering and solution sales engineering position with various organizations. Robin holds numerous industry certifications, including MCSE, CCNA, CCNA Voice, CCDA and CCDP. He has expertise in SIP Trunking and diverse WAN topologies including MPLS networks, Point-to-Point, Private IP, and managed VPN solutions. Robin is expert in premises-based IP telephony PBX’s as well as hosted, cloud-based offerings. Panelist - Satish Shenoy, Director, Cloud and SI/SP Strategy, Americas, Office of the Sales CTO, Avaya Satish Shenoy is a sales and business development executive with over 15 years of experience building successful teams and growing businesses across the US and Asia. As the Director of Cloud and SI/SP Strategy within the Sales CTO Office at Avaya, Satish is responsible for developing strategic alliances and partnerships with global SI/SPs and Value Added Resellers (VARs) with a focus on Avaya’s Unified Communications and Contact Center SaaS businesses across North and South America. Satish has held several leadership roles at Avaya, Inc. and Alcatel-Lucent managing sales teams, leading product development and customer service organizations. He has managed businesses ranging from $60-$200M across many industry verticals and multiple market segments. Satish has an MBA from Columbia University and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University. Panelist - Vikram Lahiri, Portfolio Manager, Cloud Services, NEC Corporation of America Bachelor Degree in Engineering from University of Ranchi (India). He has ver 7 years’ experience from “Design, Develop, Integrate and Implementation” in cloud services in all aspects of cloud framework (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) with cloud deployment models (Private, Public, Hybrid). Vikram also has strong experience in driving Technical Products & Processes from Designing Phase to Implementation with Technical Customer Service offering for leading Fortune 500 & Publicly Traded Companies & Clients around the world. He has published technical white papers and hosting technical webinars, presentations, workshops for cloud and other service offerings. Key Accomplishments: Expanded Business Operations and Clients from 3 Countries to 55 Countries in 2 years. Specialization in Cloud Technology, Cloud Printing and Customer Support & Relationship building. Branding, Managing and Positioning product lines and key contributor in Social Marketing.
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Wednesday, March 20
2:30 PM – 5:30 PM	RFP: UC Without Buying a New PBX - Location: Osceola B Unified communications works with and through a PBX, but it’s not necessary to purchase and install a new PBX in order to get UC capabilities. There are multiple UC solution choices and they can… More ▶ Speaker/Moderator - Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, UniComm Consulting Marty focuses on helping enterprises improve their business results through Unified Communications (UC). Marty sees UC as ‘communications integrated to optimize business processes’. This includes collaboration tools and social media as well as implementation options via premise, cloud and hybrid deployments. UniComm Consulting uses a suite of proven methods to identify communication ‘hot spots’ which UC can remove or mitigate to produce high ROI business process optimization. UniComm Consulting also assists clients in preparing their multi-year UC roadmaps, to optimize benefits while reducing costs. Marty contributes to the industry via UC sessions at Enterprise Connect and Interop, industry webinars, posts on UCStrategies.com and NoJitter.com, and speaking engagements at customer, vendor and channel events. His background includes roles in sales, product management, financial management and general management with IBM, ATT/Lucent/Avaya, a major west-coast communications VAR, and at two venture-funded startups. Marty lives in Northern California and is a graduate of the Haas Business School, University of California, Berkeley. Panelist - Allan Mendelsohn, Marketing Director, UC Applications, Avaya Allan is the Marketing Director for UC Applications 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 midsized 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). Panelist - Davide Petramala, Executive Vice President, Sales & Business Development, Esna Davide joined Esna in 1993 and oversees all sales, professional services and business development for Esna worldwide. During Davide's tenure, revenue has grown over 200%, the customer base has expanded to 30 countries, and he has initiated and maintains strategic relationships with Google™, Cisco®, Avaya®, ShoreTel®, VMware® and others. His over 20 years in unified communications and collaboration have given Davide deep understanding of how enterprises leverage communication software to improve productivity, reduce costs and foster greater collaboration. A frequent speaker and an active blogger, Davide brings real world examples to his audiences so they can learn new and innovative approaches to communicating and collaborating in today's dynamic workspace. Davide holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from McGill University, majoring in International Business and Marketing. Panelist - Jack Jachner, VP Business Development OpenTouch, Alcatel-Lucent Dr. Jack Jachner brings more than 20 years of telecommunications research and development experience to his current position at Alcatel-Lucent in business development for OpenTouch in North America. In his current role, Dr. Jachner is responsible for directions and partnerships to enable collaborative conversations via an award winning platform like OpenTouch. Jack has served in a variety of positions in Alcatel then Alcatel-Lucent, including operational management in the Enterprise Communication Server business unit, in the Research and Innovation and in the CTO. Previously, Dr. Jachner has held positions at Tellabs, the Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation (AAEC), and Bell Northern Research. Jack holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, and a Master of Science degree in data networking and Doctor of Science degree in digital signal processing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Jack is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and holds a number of patents in the area of communication applications. Panelist - Pat Henkle, Director, Product Management, NEC Corporation As Director of Product Line Management, Pat is responsible for the UNIVERGE 3C product line, the latest generation of Unified Communications software from NEC. Prior to NEC, Pat led the product management team at Sphere Communications, which was acquired by NEC. Sphere Communications was the developer of Sphericall a fully software based IP PBX and Unified communications product. Sphere Communications was awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for the packet based PBX. Prior to Sphere Communications, Pat was responsible for managing a global portfolio of carrier class multi-media access gateways for Internet Access and VoIP at 3Com Corporation and US Robotics Corporation (acquired by 3Com). Before joining US Robotics, Pat held a variety of positions ranging from software development, technical sales engineering and product management at Ameritech Corporation where his expertise involved the blending of broadband networking technologies and networked software applications for automated workflow and decision support systems. Pat graduated from the University of Illinois – Chicago with a Bachelors of Science in Quantitative Methods and Information Decision Sciences. He lives in Chicago, Illinois with his wife Kim and their three children. Panelist - Frank Fender, UCConsultant, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc. Frank Fender is a Unified Communications Product Manager and Architect at Siemens Enterprise Communications Corporation in their Global OpenScape Unified Communications Server practice. Frank has been specifically focused on UC deliverables since 2003. In those days the technology was known as Real-Time Collaboration (RTC). He was instrumental in assisting Siemens with first-to-market delivery of a SOA-based rich telephony presence aggregation system with their award-winning OpenScape UC system. Frank has an MBA, a BS in Computer Science, and 20 years of voice, data, and development experience as a Unified Communications Architect, Integrated Communications Consultant, Client/Server and Web Services Software Developer. Frank has worked in various capacities as Manager, Director, Board Member, CFO, and Chairman of a number of companies that he has founded, co-founded, managed or developed. He has design, analysis, development and project management experience in telecommunications, convergence and data processing systems in the private and public sectors including detailed software design, and structured development methodologies. His UC knowledge has been applied to the design and development of call routing servers, voicemail systems, and complex call centers utilizing CTI, UC, IVRs, and telephony systems in the US, England, Germany, and New Zealand, at Fortune 500 companies including Siemens, IBM, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Sears, Shimano, SBC, Office Depot, Dow Corning, LightBridge and DoubleClick. Panelist - Julie Reed, Sr. Product Manager, Social Communications, IBM Panelist - Mike Roussey, Product Manager, Cisco Mike is a Product Manager in the Collaboration Infrastructure Business Unit at Cisco. Mike’s focus at Cisco is on making video an integral component of Cisco’s collaboration solution. In his current role, Mike manages the Cisco Video Communication Server (VCS) product line. This includes working very closely with the UC Manager team in direct support of making video pervasive throughout the Cisco UC solution. Prior to Cisco, Mike worked for Tandberg, which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. At Tandberg Mike held several roles in Product Management and Product Marketing, all of which focused on video infrastructure, personal video and applications. Mike holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Pittsburgh and a Bachelor’s degree from Syracuse University. Mike enjoys tennis, basketball, and keeping up on current events. He resides in the Washington, DC area with his wife and two sons.
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