SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) has become the dominant protocol for IP communications. This workshop will take a unique look at SIP, how it works, and the major issues impacting deployments.
With a big focus on SIP interoperability issues, the session will show how SIP works along the major components of SIP architecture, SIP addressing and registration, session establishment, SIP message routing, and connecting SIP across the PSTN. SIP trunking deployment options and Session Border Controllers will have an extra focus with discussion on NAT, Security, QoS, Codecs, Traffic Normalization and more. Enterprises need to understand how to get service into their networks and manage their voice traffic whilst negotiating around Interop issues. Attendance of this session will help smooth the path to a SIP based network.
Attendees will receive an inventory of SIP resources—books, papers, organizations and discount vouchers for additional training.
Speaker - Graham Francis, CEO, The SIP School™ (a Vocale Ltd company)
Graham has been working in IT and telecoms for 25 years and holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and Computing. After an early career at Lucas Aerospace and AT&T, Graham founded Vocale Ltd in 2000. He has since been the driving force behind the company ensuring that corporate clients receive the best possible technical training for their staff on a variety of topics ranging from Networking and Voice over IP through to SIP.
The SIP School™ was created when Graham saw an opportunity to provide a single source of training and certification on the protocol that is underpinning unified communication products and services. The SIP School’s training and certification services are endorsed by the Telecommunications Industry Association as well as multiple manufacturers and enterprises, globally.
As Unified Communications technologies mature and integrate more tightly with the rest of the enterprise infrastructure, the tools for managing UC also mature, and offer increased opportunities to automate processes that used to be done manually by telecom/IT staff. Automating the provisioning and management systems has obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and increased ease of use for the end user. So where do we stand with the move towards greater automation in provisioning and management? In this session, you’ll hear real-world users describe their automated management processes and how they were able to achieve savings and greater user satisfaction. You’ll come away with specific steps you can take to emulate their success.
KEY QUESTIONS:
* What management and provisioning processes can you automate for UC today? What’s in the future?
* What must be the state of your underlying UC deployment and your infrastructure generally in order to support automated UC management?
* What configuration processes can be converted to self-service for the end user? Which ones shouldn’t be?
* What interoperability and integration issues exist when you’re trying to automate the management of your UC systems?
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 product development, conducts primary research, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She serves as chief financial officer, as well.
For the past 20 years, Robin has advised and worked with hundreds of senior IT executives, ranging in size from Fortune 100 to Fortune 2000, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. She also has developed industry-leading, interactive cost models for some of the world's largest enterprises and vendors.
Robin is a widely recognized expert in Voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, advanced communications services, mobility, services, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, presenting at IT Roadmap, VoiceCon, Citrix Synergy, AT&T Technical Leader Forums, Interop, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit. She also writes the IT Transformation column for No Jitter, and the Borderless Networks blog for Network World.
Robin also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for The OnBoard Group, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children's cancer and other charities.
Before joining Nemertes, Robin shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Robin served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Robin also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigious awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues.
Robin also taught ethics at the Poynter Institute for Advanced Media Studies. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and American Medical News. Robin has a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana. She lives in Illinois with her husband and four daughters.
For decades, we’ve heard that “convergence” was coming. Well, it’s arrived, and it’s becoming pervasive. The old boundaries within communications and collaboration are breaking down, as business apps and processes run across wired and wireless facilities, and are composed of a mix of data, voice, video and graphics.
As technology boundaries blur, so do others, most notably, what will you buy and from whom: Whether the topic is communications or the data center, video or storage, servers or collaboration services, there are new options for partners and delivery systems. Services and apps can be provided via the Cloud, on-premises or a mix of the two. As a result, it can no longer be assumed that the communications and collaboration partners an enterprise has had for the past decade will remain so in the decade to come.
So what is the going-forward model for enterprise communications and collaboration? Will the traditional pillars of enterprise communications architecture -- voice vs. data vs. video -- be replaced with choices organized around the desktop vs. the network vs. the “Cloud”? If the “consumerization of IT” is inevitable, how will the vendors meet the enduring requirements for security, compliance scalability, manageability and cost-effectiveness? And as consolidation continues within the industry, is genuine competition going to disappear?
A panel of senior IT executives will discuss these and related issues. The conversation will be essential as you develop your architecture and review your options for systems, services and applications.
Moderator - Fred Knight, GM/Co-Chair, Enterprise Connect, Publisher, NoJitter.com
Fred Knight is GM/Co-Chair of Enterprise Connect – formerly 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 General Manager. Since then, VoiceCon, which was renamed Enterprise Connect in March 2010, has grown into the leading event for enterprise communications and collaboration.
Fred also led the evolution of VoiceCon from an annual conference into a 12-month per year operation, comprising multiple events per year, a Webinar series, Virtual Events and weekly e-newsletters.
From 1984-2007 Fred was editor and then publisher of Business Communications Review. 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 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.
Eric Krapf is the Program Co-Chair of the Enterprise Connect 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, TechWeb'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 - Barry Libenson, Vice President and CIO, Land O'Lakes, Inc.
Barry Libenson was appointed vice president, chief information officer for Land O’Lakes in January 2010. Libenson is responsible for aligning Land O'Lakes technology strategy with the company's business objectives and has been instrumental in moving the company’s IT resources to a highly efficient, centralized operating company model. He leads a responsive, service-oriented organization that enables business performance by providing integrated value through applications as well as operating the IT infrastructure as a cost-effective, high-performance utility. He is a member of the company’s senior strategy team and sets all IT direction for the enterprise.
Prior to joining Land O’Lakes, he most recently served as vice president and chief information officer at Ingersoll Rand. In that role, he led the IT staff through strategy development, significant improvements in company-wide efficiency and effectiveness, the IT integration of a major acquisition, and the successful implementation of a common ERP footprint across the enterprise. Libenson holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Systems from Colgate University and a master's degree in Business from the Fuqua School at Duke University.
Panelist - Stuart Shirai, Manager, Network & Telecom, Hawai‘i Medical Service Association, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Hawai‘i
As we enter the era of truly converged networks, the ground-rules for network design are changing. Pervasive use of Voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing drive new requirements for how the LAN and WAN are provisioned, configured, monitored and managed. This workshop will give you an overview of network design issues for a combined voice, video and data network and will delve into the details of Quality of Service (QoS), bandwidth management, network reliability and monitoring approaches. The tutorial will provide 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 enterprise network.
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?
* What services do I need from my WAN vendor to support voice and video? What is an appropriate Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
* Can you run VOIP or video over the Internet with acceptable QOS/quality of experience (QOE)?
* How do I classify traffic in the network to ensure voice and video are treated correctly without opening my network up to overutilization by unauthorized endpoints?
* How do you extend your upgrade to serve mobile workers?
* What tools are needed for testing and monitoring a converged network with voice and video?
* How can I manage the huge bandwidth demand that desktop and mobile video will cause on my enterprise network?
Speaker - John Bartlett, Sr. Dir. Product Management, Polycom
John Bartlett is a leading authority on real-time traffic, application performance and Quality of Service (QoS) techniques. He specializes in helping enterprises design and configure networks to support video conferencing.
John currently serves as a Sr. Director in Product Management for Networking Services at Polycom. In this role he is leading a professional services team to support Polycom customers in upgrading their networks to provide consistent high-quality video delivery.
Before Polycom, John worked as an independent consultant for 15 years, assessing customer networks for support of video applications and other application performance issues. John engaged with many enterprises and vendors to analyze network performance problems, design network solutions, and support network deployments. John has 34 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.
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.
John also spent six years with Intel Corporation during the early years of microprocessor design and acceptance into the market. 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.
Panelist - Manfred Arndt, Distinguished Technologist, Advanced Technology Group, HP
Distinguished Technologist, Advanced Technology Group (HPN CTO Group)
Hewlett-Packard
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; HPQ; Information Technology and Services industry
April 2010 – Present (1 year 9 months) Sacramento, California Area
Driving the Unified Communications strategy and vision along with Campus LAN requirements across much of the HP Networking product portfolio to increase market share.
Working with strategic technology partners.
Interacting with HP TS, HP ES and HP IT to drive engineering requirements.
HP Distinguished Technologist, HP Networking
Hewlett-Packard
Public Company; 10,001+ employees; HPQ; Information Technology and Services industry
2003 – April 2010 (7 years) Sacramento, California Area
Convergence Solutions Architect responsible for architecting IP Telephony and multimedia capabilities across HP ProCurve’s networking products and working with strategic technology partners. Also participated in several TIA and IEEE standards groups, helping defining networking and telecommunications standards.
System Software Manager, Lead Engineer
Malibu Networks
2000 – 2003 (3 years) Sacramento, California Area
Led the software development of a pre-standard WiMAX broadband and subsequent Wi-Fi wireless access system at a VC funded startup with over $40 million in funding, which included advanced QoS and scheduling algorithms to support business grade VoIP and video conferencing.
Technologist
Fluke Networks
Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; DHR; Computer Networking industry
1997 – 2000 (3 years) Colorado Springs, Colorado Area
System architect and technical lead developing various network diagnostic products, including a Gigabit integrated network analyzer that combined advanced network discovery, expert system, SNMP analysis, RMON2 monitoring, packet capture/decode and high-performance protocol analysis.
As AppNeta CTO, Matt is responsible for guiding technology and product vision and managing the advanced research, development, QA, customer support and information technology teams. Prior to joining AppNeta, Matt was the CTO of the Information and Event Management business unit of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. He joined EMC after the acquisition of Network Intelligence Corp. where Matt was a founder. In that role, he was also part of EMC's Office of the CTO, where he and his peer group had responsibility for EMC's overall strategic technology direction. Prior to NIC and RSA, Matt held senior technology and sales management positions with NetApp, Solbourne Computer and Harris Corporation.
Panelist - Paul Liesenberg, Senior Manager, Emerging Technologies Group, Cisco
Paul Liesenberg is a Sr Manager in Cisco’s Collaboration Architecture Team. Paul develops methodologies that optimally align next-generation network infrastructures and overarching business processes. Prior to Cisco, he was VP of Strategic Marketing for ZettaCom and Bivio Networks. Earlier, he was with StrataCom and Cisco post-acquisition, Nortel’s Data Networks Division, and Siemens’ Public Networks’ R&D division. He holds two patents in the area of VoIP, and an M.Sc. from TUM (Technische Universitaet Muenchen).
Panelist - Terry Slattery, Principal Consultant, Chesapeake Netcraftsmen
Terry Slattery is a Principal Consultant at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen, an advanced network consulting firm that specializes in high-profile and challenging network consulting jobs. Terry is consulting in network core switching and routing. He is the founder of Netcordia, inventor of NetMRI, is co-inventor on two patents, 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. http://www.netcraftsmen.net/voicecon-orlando-2010.html
Panelist - Stephen Campbell, IT Consultant, Stephen K Campbell Inc
Stephen Campbell performs IT consulting services in the telepresence, video conferencing and network & telecommunications infrastructure areas. He has over 21 years of IT experience with Beckman Coulter Inc. As Director of Network Services for a 10,000 employee global enterprise, he was responsible for managing the global LAN/WAN, telephony, video, email, SharePoint and document management services. He has implemented global call centers, telepresence in Europe/US/Asia, participated in the creation of a state-of-the-art colocation data center, and implemented a global MPLS wide area network.
Prior to working in IT, Stephen held various positions within the engineering department of Coulter Electronics Inc., and became a co-inventor on two US patents for blood analyzer electronic circuits. He previously worked as a Field Applications Engineering Manager for semiconductor-maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); worked as a manufacturer's sales representative for Conley & Associates in Central Florida; and was an Electronics Design Engineer with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in Atlanta, Ga. He holds Bachelor Electrical Engineering and Masters of Science Electrical Engineering degrees from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
Dr Mike Hollier, Vice President Voice Platform, Dolby Labs
Through the 1990’s Mike was at BT Labs (Europe’s largest telecoms R&D centre) where he directed BT’s research on audio, video and multi-media performance assessment. He also worked with MIT-Media-Lab and Lake-DSP on ground-breaking spatial-audio for virtual meeting spaces. His PhD was gained from the University of Essex in 1995 for his work on using models of human hearing to predict speech quality - leading to the ITU-T PESQ standard.
In 2000 Mike left BT to found Psytechnics Ltd. He managed the company's formation and early growth with VC financing. As Psytechnics’ CTO Mike was a market evangelist as well as overseeing the R&D of a new generation of “service-provider-grade” voice and video products. Technology licensing deals included performance measurement software for Microsoft’s Office Communicator solution as well as performance management products for large enterprise and communications service providers such as KPN, BT, and AT&T.
In July 2010 Mike joined Dolby Labs as Vice President, Voice Platform to onward develop Dolby’s world leading audio technology and know-how for the rapidly emerging Unified Communications and Collaboration market.
Mike is a winner of the Alan Rudge Medal for Innovation, and the British Computer Society Medal. He has 25 patents and more than 40 publications in the fields of voice and video performance management and spatial audio.
Outsourcing has been around for a long time, and it’s become a routine part of technology implementation. It has neither “taken over” and put IT out of business, as early predictions warned, nor has it gone away. Instead, it’s one option on a menu of choices for any given technology or process. So given that outsourcing is a part of doing business, how do you define hard metrics for understanding when it’s likely to succeed for a given enterprise technology need? And how to you measure the success of a particular outsourcing project in the enterprise communications world? In this session, a consulting firm with deep understanding of outsourcing success and failure factors will share its knowledge with you. You’ll come away with a set of specific, defined criteria that will let you have clearer visibility on whether outsourcing a particular function is likely to succeed, or whether a given outsourcing project has met its goals.
KEY QUESTIONS:
* How has outsourcing changed over the past several years? What’s likely to be the scope of an outsourced project today in communications, and what entities will compete for the job?
* What communications functions are the best candidates for outsourcing today, and how do you determine whether outsourcing is the right choice in these areas for your enterprise?
* What are the specific metrics or criteria that you should establish in order to get a clear sense of the success or prospective success of an outsourcing proposal?
* How do the various forms of outsourcing—from managed services to hosted infrastructure to turnkey outsourcing—differ in today’s environment, and how do they match up with the needs your enterprise may have?
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 product development, conducts primary research, develops cost models, and advises leading enterprises, vendors, and carriers. She serves as chief financial officer, as well.
For the past 20 years, Robin has advised and worked with hundreds of senior IT executives, ranging in size from Fortune 100 to Fortune 2000, analyzing their use of technology and capturing best practices. She also has developed industry-leading, interactive cost models for some of the world's largest enterprises and vendors.
Robin is a widely recognized expert in Voice over IP, convergence, collaboration, advanced communications services, mobility, services, and branch-office technologies. She is a sought-after speaker at conferences and trade shows, presenting at IT Roadmap, VoiceCon, Citrix Synergy, AT&T Technical Leader Forums, Interop, Mobile Business Expo, Supercomm, Telecom, and CeBit. She also writes the IT Transformation column for No Jitter, and the Borderless Networks blog for Network World.
Robin also has personal experience managing operations and developing new product offerings. Her entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding and overseeing marketing and business development for The OnBoard Group, a water-purification business in Illinois. She also served as president of Living Hope Lutheran Church, and ran several successful fundraisers for children's cancer and other charities.
Before joining Nemertes, Robin shaped technology and business coverage as Senior News Editor of InformationWeek, a leading business-technology publication with 440,000 readers. Prior to joining InformationWeek, Robin served in a variety of capacities at Data Communications magazine, where helped set strategic direction, oversaw reader surveys, and provided quantitative and statistical analysis. At these organizations Robin also helped develop, organize, and operate Web sites, TV, and print coverage of major trade shows. She has won numerous, prestigious awards for her in-depth analyses of business-technology issues.
Robin also taught ethics at the Poynter Institute for Advanced Media Studies. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, and American Medical News. Robin has a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana. She lives in Illinois with her husband and four daughters.
Real-time traffic (voice and video) demands a network that delivers low latency, low packet loss and low jitter. And that’s not easy to accomplish. The dynamic character of modern networks, and the growing requirement for highly distributed configurations can lead to errors in design or implementation that cause quality problems for voice and video apps.
And so, a new breed of testing methodologies and tools is required to test or monitor converged networks and to isolate problems. This session will analyze and categorize these tools, and list vendors that provide the different kinds of solutions needed to manage today’s complex networks.
KEY QUESTIONS:
* Why are new tools required to support voice and video conferencing? Why can’t I use the tools that have been serving me well for years?
* What features are required in these tools for managing and monitoring real-time networks?
* Who are the vendors and what types of tools to they offer?
Speaker - Terry Slattery, Principal Consultant, Chesapeake Netcraftsmen
Terry Slattery is a Principal Consultant at Chesapeake Netcraftsmen, an advanced network consulting firm that specializes in high-profile and challenging network consulting jobs. Terry is consulting in network core switching and routing. He is the founder of Netcordia, inventor of NetMRI, is co-inventor on two patents, 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. http://www.netcraftsmen.net/voicecon-orlando-2010.html
Panelist - John Dunne, Manager - Strategic Marketing, Integrated Research
John Dunne is the General Manager – Product Management for Integrated Research - developer of Prognosis performance monitoring software. He is an expert in systems monitoring and management with 15 years experience in the ICT industry, including seven years with Integrated Research.
John is responsible for the company’s global product strategy and alliances, ensuring the delivery of high-quality products aligned to customers’ strategic directions. His current focus includes development of enterprise-class IP telephony management and reporting solutions to deliver business insight to global organizations and service providers.
As AppNeta CTO, Matt is responsible for guiding technology and product vision and managing the advanced research, development, QA, customer support and information technology teams. Prior to joining AppNeta, Matt was the CTO of the Information and Event Management business unit of RSA, The Security Division of EMC. He joined EMC after the acquisition of Network Intelligence Corp. where Matt was a founder. In that role, he was also part of EMC's Office of the CTO, where he and his peer group had responsibility for EMC's overall strategic technology direction. Prior to NIC and RSA, Matt held senior technology and sales management positions with NetApp, Solbourne Computer and Harris Corporation.
Panelist - Paul Barrett, Chief Product Officer – Voice and Video Communications, NetScout Systems
Paul Barrett is responsible for the Netscout’s voice and video technology strategy. Paul was CTO at Psytechnics prior to its acquisition by NetScout and was responsible for all research, development and standards activities at Psytechnics. He joined Psytechnics shortly after its creation in 2001 and worked for ten years at BT Laboratories before that. Paul has more than 20 years of experience in the telecommunications industry and has been actively involved in international standardization for most of that time. His standards work has encompassed many aspects of voice and video communications, including four generations of GSM and 3G codecs. Paul is currently a Vice Chairman of the ITU Study Group responsible for "Performance, QoS and QoE". He is a Chartered Engineer, Member of the IET and IEEE, and holds a Masters Degree in Electronic Systems Engineering from the University of York.
The explosion in wireless and the desire for the latest and greatest smartphone or tablet has made “BYOD” – Bring Your Own Device – all the rage. But BYOD is just the latest example of how the “Consumerization” of IT is changing user behavior as well as corporate policies about what can attach to and be sent over the network.
In this Summit, we’ll discuss the steps you can realistically take to influence user choices in mobile device usage, application deployment and the use of social networking. Can you issue outright bans on specific gear and apps and, if you try, how do you enforce such policies? We’ll also discuss the best strategies for living with user-driven technology adoption; and we’ll even try to find ways that you can leverage such adoption to the business’s benefit, and encourage responsible trialing and use of emerging technologies by the user base. You’ll come away with the elements of a strategy for setting and enforcing policies, and accommodating user choice wherever possible.
Moderator - Irwin Lazar, Analyst, Nemertes Research
Irwin Lazar is the Vice President for Communications and Collaboration Research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, conducts strategic seminars and advises clients. Mr. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the enterprise in areas including VOIP, unified communications, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration and advanced network services. 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 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.
Panelist - Robert Harris, President, Communications Advantage, Inc.
Robert Harris brings both intuitive technical knowledge and solid management skills to consulting projects. Recent projects have included multi-vendor computer telephony integration and voice/data convergence for both large enterprises and small/medium-sized businesses.
Robert Harris contributes several articles each year to NoJitter.com on subjects ranging from telemanagement to future technology trends and speaks on telemanagement at industry conferences. Robert Harris serves as Senoir Vice President on the Board of Directors of the Society of Telecommunications Consultants (STC).
Panelist - Zeus Kerravala, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Research, Yankee Group
Zeus Kerravala is a member of Yankee Group's Affiliate Program focused on unified communications and collaboration, cloud computing and network infrastructure.
Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst of ZK Research, where he provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long-term strategic advice. He works with end-user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software and services and the financial community looking to invest in the companies he covers. His research includes a mix of end-user and channel interviews, surveys of IT buyers, investor interviews and briefings from the IT vendor community, all of which provide a 360-degree view of the technologies he covers from buyers of technology, investors, resellers and manufacturers.
Kerravala uses the traditional online and e-mail distribution channel for the research but heavily augments opinion and insight through social media. He is also heavily quoted in business press and the technology press and is a regular speaker at events such as Interop and Enterprise Connect.
Prior to ZK Research, Kerravala spent 10 years as an analyst at Yankee Group. He joined Yankee Group in March of 2001 as a Director and held positions up through Senior Vice President and Distinguished Research Fellow.
Michael is an independent consultant, industry analyst, and writer who focuses on wireless technologies, mobile UC, and fixed-mobile convergence. He wrote the book Voice Over Wireless LANs- The Complete Guide (Elsevier, 2008), though his expertise spans the full range of wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, Cellular, WiMAX, and RFID. A lively and informative speaker, Michael has made frequent appearances at trade shows and conferences including VoiceCon and InterOp, and he now serves as the program chair for Wireless and Mobility at VoiceCon. In the consulting area, Mr. Finneran has provided assistance to carriers, equipment vendors, end users, investment firms, and a number of government agencies. A prolific writer, for twenty-three years he wrote the Networking Intelligence column for "Business Communications Review". He now contributes on wireless and mobility to NoJitter as well as UC Strategies.com. He has published numerous white papers and has contributed to Computerworld, Data Communications, The Ticker, and The ACUTA Journal. Well respected as an educator, he has conducted over 2000 seminars on networking topics in the US, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He taught in the Graduate Telecommunications program at Pace University, and conducted programs at the Center for the Study of Data Processing at Washington University in St. Louis. His courses are now offered through Telecom + UC Training. Mr. Finneran holds a Bachelor of Arts degree (Magna Cum Laude) from Manhattan College and a Masters Degree from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
Panelist - Melanie Turek, Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan
Melanie Turek is a Principal Analyst 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 CMP Media's Enterprise 2.0 Conference, for which she serves as an advisory board member and track chair. Prior to working at Frost & Sullivan, Ms. Turek was a Senior Vice-President and 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.