Unified Communications Track
| Monday, March 26 | |
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Unified Communications continues to gain market momentum because it focuses a wide range of communications and collaboration capabilities on solving business problems – from improving the productivity of individuals and workgroups to revising and revitalizing business processes. But the sheer scope of UC also poses problems: Where to begin? How to organize the technology choices? How to best match UC capabilities with the needs and culture of the enterprise. 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.
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The evolution of IP-PBX architecture has resulted in busting up the once centralized PBX platform into a series of servers – call control, applications, etc. And over the past 4-5 years, IBM, Microsoft and other suppliers have offered full-fledged UC solutions that are based more on desktops and applications than on traditional PBX designs. More recently, in a kind of “back to the future” movement, there’s an emerging set of offerings that rely on the Cloud and other managed/hosted services. 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. Moderator - Jim Burton, CXO, CT Link/UCStrategies 
Jim Burton is Founder and CEO of CT Link, LLC. 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. Panelist - Chris McGugan, Vice President, Emerging Technologies, Avaya Chris McGugan is Vice President of Emerging Technologies at Avaya. The role includes responsibility for software development, product management and marketing.
Most recently, Chris was Avaya’s Vice President of Product Management Contact Center Solutions from 2008-2011. The role included responsibility for product roadmaps, architecture, and overall direction of the contact center offers.
Prior to this, Chris was Vice President of Products & Engineering at Belkin, a leader in the consumer electronics market, where he lead the overall product portfolio, design, and research and development efforts for their consumer and commercial product lines.
Prior to Belkin, Chris was Sr. Director, Product Management at Motorola (formally Symbol Technologies), where he was responsible for all enterprise wireless products in the Motorola portfolio.
Chris arrived at Symbol Technologies following a 9 year voice and data networking career with Cisco Systems. While at Cisco, Chris held various senior management positions in the routing and switching businesses, research and education business, and was responsible for the direction of many product lines during his tenure.
Chris remains active in many technology standards bodies and industry associations, helping drive the advancement of networking technology.
Chris is an alumnus of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Panelist - Warren Barkley, General Manager, Lync Customer & Partner Mgmt, Microsoft Panelist - Vishakha Radia, Managing Director, Customer Business Transformation (CBT), Cisco
Vishakha Radia is the Managing Director of Customer Business Transformation (CBT) Consulting team in Cisco’s Voice Technology Group (VTG). She and her team work with Business and IT Executives across multiple industries including Manufacturing, Retail, Service Provider, Healthcare, Government and Education and Financial Services, to define transformational strategies, drive process change and quantify the business value of collaboration technologies. Vishakha also drives scaling of all CBT Collaboration Business Value Assets to the Cisco Field and Partners. Panelist - Manfred Arndt, Distinguished Technologist, Advanced Technology Group, HP 
Distinguished Technologist, Advanced Technology Group (HPN CTO Group) Panelist - Todd Landry, Sr. Vice President, NEC Corporation of America 
Currently, Mr. Landry is Senior Vice President for NEC where he oversees the company’s product strategies, go-to-market activities and strategic alliances surrounding its Unified Communications and Collaboration portfolio. Prior to NEC, Mr. Landry held senior positions in companies that incuded Sphere Communications, 3Com’s CommWorks Corporation, and U.S. Robotics.where he led product management, marketing and business development. His career is founded on engineering in the tele and data communications sectors with experience in hardware systems and software applications. Panelist - Adrian Brookes, VP, Siemens Enterprise Communications 
As an experienced IT professional Adrian has a solid foundation in technology, commercial awareness, budget management and how technology has a positive impact upon business. Adrian holds experience in both the end user and manufacturer segments (SME, Large Enterprise, & Carrier), and this has given him enormous experience to understand the problems faced by multi-national large enterprises working in varying vertical sectors (Government/Federal, Financial, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media, Pharmaceutical, & Transportation). | |
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The RFP process for a selecting a new enterprise communica¬tions system has changed significantly during the past few years based on changing technologies, pricing models, system design and performance capabilities. New ‘Cloud-based’ offerings as well as those from Unified Communications vendors have dramatically changed the landscape. Speaker - Dave Stein, Principal, Stein Consulting Group
Mr. Stein, a principal with Stein Consulting Group, has more than 30 years of consulting, information systems and telecommunications experience, with a primary emphasis on IP communications and technology infrastructure projects. Mr. Stein has previously held key management positions with PlanNet Consulting. Inteliant Corporation, COMSUL Ltd./Enterprise Consulting Group and ICL. Panelist - Bob Close, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco
Bob Close Technical Marketing Engineer Cisco Systems, Inc. San Jose, CA USA
Bob Close has been with Cisco for approximately 12 years now. He started his career with Cisco as a Technical Marketing Engineer where he was responsible for interoperability between Cisco CallManager and PBX’s/Voicemail systems. Bob has continued this work by being a primary driver of a number of key initiatives, some of which include the Digital PBX Adapter (DPA), the VG248 (48-port analog voice gateway with voicemail integration), QSIG and Annex M1 where he also continues to work on PBX migration. Lately, Bob has been branching out into the field of CTI as well as driving scalability increases with Unified Communications Manager.
Prior to joining Cisco, Bob held a Product Management role at Octel Communications and Lucent Technologies, where he provided the strategy as well as ongoing tactical product needs for PBX integrations for the Aria, Serenade and Unified Messaging platforms.
Bob’s first position in the telecommunications field was with GEC in the UK working in a number of different roles with the UK variant of the Northern Telecom SL-1 PBX. From GEC Bob moved onto Mercury Communications where he supported the sales team on the company’s various product offerings. Next was GPT/Siemens where he continued to work on PBX’s including the Siemens Hicom 300.
Bob has the equivalent of a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering.
Bob enjoys music, movies and photography. He currently resides in Sunnyvale, California with his wife and two children. Panelist - Jamie Stark, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Panelist - Pat Henkle, Director - Sphericall Product Line 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 - Peter Greco, Director: Strategic Solutions, Siemens Enterprise Communications Inc. 
Peter Greco is Director Strategic Solution Support with Siemens Communications. His responsibilities include: field support, product lifecycle management, customer pursuit support, Channel Support, programs, and Proof of Concept delivery. Over the past 30 years Peter has held roles in sales, operations, product and Program management in the various entities that have become Siemens Enterprise Communications (ROLM, IBM, Siemens). | |
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Speaker - Kevin Kieller, Principal, enableUC 
Kevin Kieller is a partner with enableUC, a company that helps measure, monitor and improve Unified Communications and collaboration usage and adoption. He also currently holds the role as the Lead Unified Communications Strategist at Bell Canada. | |
| Tuesday, March 27 | |
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Unified Communications works perfectly within the enterprise, but even more value can be gained from inter-company UC – a feature known as ‘inter-domain federation’. Having full multi-modal, presence-driven communications access to key business partners could be an extremely powerful tool. Speaker - Russell Bennett, Principal, UC Insights 
Russell Bennett is the Principal of UC Insights, a consulting firm that specializes in Unified Communications. UC Insights helps clients to navigate the UC ecosystem and to manage the impact of UC on their business. Panelist - David Chavez, Chief Technical Officer, Avaya
David Chavez is Avaya’s 45 year-old Chief Technical Officer with a background of Systems Architecture spanning 22 years of professional experience. His contribution has been recognized by 61 patent awards, with many more pending. He successfully and consistently bridges technology innovation and practicality, the lab and the marketplace, technical colleagues and customers.
Panelist - Farzin Shahidi, CEO, NextPlane Farzin is a successful entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience in the enterprise software and services industry.
Prior to NextPlane, Farzin was Director of Product Management at Cendura. At Cendura he was instrumental in positioning Cohesion as a leading Application Configuration Management solution. Cendura was acquired by CA in 2006.
Previously, Farzin was Director of Product Management at Jareva. At Jareva Farzin managed OpForce, a pioneering Datacenter Automation solution. VERITAS acquired Jareva in 2003. At VERITAS (Now Symantec) Farzin grew OpForce from being a technology acquisition with zero revenue to a $15 million product line in less than two years.
Farzin received a MBA from Drexel University, and a BS in Chemical Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder. Panelist - Albert Kooiman, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation Panelist - Bryan Morris, Technical Marketing Manager, VTG, Cisco | |
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Multivendor interoperability is a key part of any Unified Communications implementation. Few enterprises will get all of their UC infrastructure and applications from a single vendor. In addition, UC delivers value through integration with business processes, which requires interoperation with other software applications (e.g. document creation and management; for sales, services, logistics; et al.). Speaker - Russell Bennett, Principal, UC Insights
Russell Bennett is the Principal of UC Insights, a consulting firm that specializes in Unified Communications. UC Insights helps clients to navigate the UC ecosystem and to manage the impact of UC on their business. Speaker - 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. Panelist - Allan Mendelsohn, Director, UC Marketing, Avaya Allan is the Director of Marketing 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 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 - Stefan Karapetkov, Emerging Technologies Director, Polycom Inc. Stefan Karapetkov is Emerging Technologies Director at Polycom, where he focuses on the audio and visual communication markets and technologies. He has an MBA from Santa Clara University (USA) and an MS degree in Engineering from the University of Chemnitz (Germany). Stefan has spent more than 15 years in the communication industry, and currently serves on the Internet2 Applications, Middleware, and Services Advisory Council. His blog http://videonetworker.blogspot.com/ focuses on HD voice, HD video, unified communication and collaboration. He has authored series of white papers and articles in trade publications, and has been a frequent speaker at industry events. Panelist - Himanshu Desai, Director, Collaboration Practice, Cisco In his role as Director of the Collaboration Advanced Services Practice at Cisco, Himanshu Desai leads a team of consultants and engineers providing life cycle services around collaboration solution to Cisco’s enterprise customers. The services includes interoperability consulting and integration with other vendors. Panelist - B.J. Haberkorn, Lync Group Product Manager, Microsoft Panelist - Todd Landry, Sr. Vice President, NEC Corporation of America
Currently, Mr. Landry is Senior Vice President for NEC where he oversees the company’s product strategies, go-to-market activities and strategic alliances surrounding its Unified Communications and Collaboration portfolio. Prior to NEC, Mr. Landry held senior positions in companies that incuded Sphere Communications, 3Com’s CommWorks Corporation, and U.S. Robotics.where he led product management, marketing and business development. His career is founded on engineering in the tele and data communications sectors with experience in hardware systems and software applications. | |
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Behind the basic questions --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? When will this market take off?
Speaker - Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC  As President and Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC and Co-Founder, UCStrategies.com, Blair provides consulting and analysis on Unified Communications and voice/data convergence markets and technologies, aimed at helping end-user and vendor clients both strategically and tactically. | |
| Wednesday, March 28 | |
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With click-to-call and Skype, not to mention softphones, computers have been used for voice communications for quite some time. But all the approaches deployed to date have been proprietary, and none come built into the most ubiquitous computer-based tool: the browser. But that’s about to change, as the standards-bodies and browser providers, notably Google and Mozilla, push to make the browser a key element in the communications experience. Moderator - Phil Edholm, President and Founder, I2C  Phil Edholm is the President and Founder of Information/Interaction Consultants (I2C). I2C consults to end users and vendors in the communications and networking industries. I2C is helps our customers deliver the value of the integration of information and interaction. Whether with Unified Communications or integration of communications and business processes, I2C has the experience and knowledge to transform your organization. Phil has over 30 years experience in creating innovations and transformation in networking and communications. Prior to founding I2C , he was Vice President of Technology Strategy and Innovation for Avaya. In this role, he was responsible for defining vision and strategic technology and the integration of the Nortel product portfolio into Avaya. He was responsible for portfolio architecture, standards activities, and User Experience. Prior to Avaya, he was CTO/CSO for Nortel Enterprise. At Nortel, he led the development of VoIP solutions and multimedia communications as well as IP transport technology. His background includes extensive LAN and data communications experience, including 13 years with Silicon Valley start-ups. Phil was a member of the IEEE 802.3 standards committee, developed the first multi-protocol network interfaces, and was a founder of the Frame Relay Forum. He is recognized as an industry visionary and in 2007, he was recognized by Frost and Sullivan with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Growth, Innovation and Leadership. Phil is a widely sought speaker and has been in the VoiceCon/Enterprise Connect Great Debate three times. He has been recognized by the IEEE as the originator of “Edholm’s Law of Bandwidth” as published in July 2004 IEEE Spectrum magazine and as one of the “Top 100 Voices of IP Communications" by Internet Telephony magazine. Phil has 12 granted patents. He holds a BSME/EE from Kettering University. Panelist - Albert Kooiman, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Corporation Panelist - Darin Dunlap, Senior Product Manager, Cisco
Darin Dunlap is a Senior Product Manager at Cisco and has worked in the collaboration and communications industry for over a decade. He is responsible for Web-based unified communications and interoperability initiatives. | |
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Many enterprises see the need for Unified Communications (UC) but don’t have the budget, the staff, the time or, necessarily, the need to roll out a new IP-PBX in order to get the new UC functions and benefits. This all-new session will ask leading UC vendors to bid a UC solution that can work with an existing PBX system. The RFP will use the same requirements as the “RFP: UC With a New IP PBX” session, so attendees can clearly see the difference between the two approaches. This session is key for Telecom and IT Directors, Managers, architects, planners, and operational teams. 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.
Panelist - Hakim Mehmood, Sr. Product manager, Cisco Systems Inc Hakim Mehmood Sr. Product Manager Cisco Systems, Inc. San Jose, CA USA
Hakim has been with Cisco for approximately 11 years now. He started his career as a Software Engineer where he was responsible for call control and interoperability between Cisco Unified Communications Manager and legacy systems. Hakim has continued this work by being a primary architect for a number of key initiatives, some of which include the Intercompany Media Engine (IME), QSIG, Annex M1, CUCM and Session Management Edition. Lately, Hakim has been branching out into the field of product management and working on long term call control strategy, licensing and product roadmaps.
Prior to joining Cisco, Hakim, worked for a series of small companies (Carrier Access Corporation, Transtream Inc., General Data Comm.) focusing on voice over packet type of technologies and interoperability.
Hakim has the equivalent of a Bachelors Degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering and an MBA from Denver University.
Hakim enjoys football and cricket, movies and photography. He currently resides in Houston, Texas with his wife and their daughter. Panelist - Pat Henkle, Director - Sphericall Product Line 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, Unified Communications Product Manager and Architect, Siemens Enterprise Communications Frank Fender is a Unified Communications Product Manager and Architect at Siemens Enterprise Communications, 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 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 Software Developer, and Technical Project Leader. He has performed a variety of technical roles including Consultant, Lead Architect, Sales Engineer, Developer, and Systems Integrator. Frank has also 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. Panelist - Allan Mendelsohn, Director, UC Marketing, Avaya Allan is the Director of Marketing 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 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 - Ian Fogg, Channel Sales Manager, Business Solutions Sales Group, RIM Panelist - Shelly Marston, Sr. Product Manager, UC Marketing, Microsoft Corporation Panelist - Julie Reed, Sr. Product Manager, IBM Sametime, IBM
Julie joined the IBM UCC team in 2011 and is responsible for Sametime Unified Telephony and all voice and video in Sametime Standard / Advanced. Previously she held leadership positions in the development organizations of Lotus Foundations and Net Integration Technologies. Panelist - Davide Petramala, EVP Business Development and Sales, ESNA | |
