Conference Speakers

Run-Time Dependability Monitoring System for Asterisk

Hira Agrawal is a Senior Research Scientist at Telcordia Technologies. He has over fifteen years of R&D experience in the software engineering and automation field. His areas of interest include model driven software engineering, software architecture, and automated software tools that leverage static and dynamic program analysis techniques.

Carrier Grade Asterisk Deployment

Dr. Daniel Kraehenbuehl is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Scout24 a large european online marketplace. He holds a P.h.D in Computer Science from MIT. In 2002 he founded Intuit Innovation, a company in Malaysia which is fully focused on Asterisk and Nagios solutions, projects and global support.

The Strategic Purpose of Open Source

Dr. Chalan Aras is vice president of marketing for Polycom's voice communications division Aras holds an MBA from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a Ph.D. in computer engineering from North Carolina State University, and is the recipient of five patents.

Asterisk Update - The Present, The Future; Asterisk Ashram: Ask the Gurus; Introduction to Asterisk Development

Russell has been a member of the core Asterisk development team since the Fall of 2004. He has been employed by Digium since early 2005. At the first AstriCon in 2004, he was named the release maintainer for Asterisk's first maintained major release series, Asterisk 1.0. He has since contributed to almost all areas of Asterisk development, from project management to core architectural design and development. Russell received a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Clemson University in the Fall of 2006.

Asterisk at the Heart of the Enterprise

Russell Clarkson is CIO of Matrix Business Technologies, a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier that offers voice and data services to the residential, small and mid-size business markets. Russell over 25 years of experience in the telecommunication and information technology industries. He has published articles in numerous magazines and co-authored the book; After the Merger, The Authoritative Guide to Integration Success.

Using Asterisk as a B2BUA

Jim Dalton founded TransNexus in 1997 to provide Operations and Billing Support system software to VoIP service providers.

Run-Time Dependability Monitoring System for Asterisk

Dr. Balakrishnan Dasarathy is currently Chief Scientist at Telcordia Technologies. He has more than 25 years of R&D and R&D Management in the development of complex systems including network management and operations support systems and middleware and run-time infrastructure for such systems.

CEL: an introduction to Asterisk's new call logging mechanism

Brian Degenhardt's experience in the hi-tech industry includes work in such diverse areas as telephony, on-line media delivery and console game development. He currently works at Digium as one of the lead engineers on the Switchvox PBX. Brian has contributed to numerous Open Source Projects including the GIMP and the Squid Web Proxy Cache. He's also contributed to the book VoIP Hacks, published by O'Reilly and Associates.

Welcome to "No Rules" Telephony

David delivers Asterisk training and consultancy around the world through his own company (TeleSpeak) in addition to designing and delivering training for a number of companies, including Digium. Known for injecting a good dose of fun into classroom training, conference speeches and life in general David is a keen Asterisk enthusiast and also enjoys podcasting, radio presenting and teaching public speaking skills. He is a Chartered Engineer with experience including Air Traffic Control communications, Wireless Local Loop, Mobile Networks, VoIP and Asterisk. Alongside his other work, David is currently investigating the integration of VoIP PBX functionality with the Femtocell.

Human Factors in Voice Interface Design

Jeff is a recognized pioneer in the Voice Processing and Internet Telephony industries. He co-founded Interface Alternative (later renamed iFace.com) in 1992 and implemented some of the first commercial grade IVR systems that included Speech Recognition, Speaker Verification and Text-To-Speech systems for use in the banking, transportation, retail, health care services, and entertainment industries.

Asterisk Update - The Present, The Future; Asterisk Ashram: Ask the Gurus; Introduction to Asterisk Development

Director of Software Technologies, Digium and Co-Maintainer of Asterisk Kevin P. Fleming has 20+ years of programming experience in fields like open source messaging and networking, and mainframe operating systems. Kevin excels in producing resource-efficient solutions through problem analysis and solution design. Believing open source is the 'right' way to develop software, Kevin uses open source solutions whenever possible.

Mulit-Server Conferencing; Audio Recording in Asterisk; Building a Hosted Call Center

Matt Florell has over 11 years experience in building and managing enterprise-level corporate IT systems specializing in IP Telephony and Call Center systems. Matt is the President of the VICIDIAL Group in Florida and is the creator of the VICIDIAL Open-Source Call Center Suite which is used by hundreds of companies around the world.

Bringing Enterprise Manageability to Asterisk

Jeff's twin passions for open source and network management brought him to his dream job working for The OpenNMS Group. Jeff's interest in Asterisk predates the project having a name, and he figures he is among the first twenty people ever to receive a PSTN call originated from Asterisk.

The Elastic Call Center

Jason Goecke is the EVP of North America of Presence Technology. He has held important positions as Head of International Operations for several companies around Europe and in the U.S. Goecke has worked for top multinational corporations among which are: The Exigen Group, where he worked as Sales Operations Manager for EMEA; Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, where he worked as Country Manager for Spain and Portugal, and Teletech, where he began his professional career in the Contact Center world as Manager. Goecke studied Information Technology at the University of Colorado.

Speech Recognition and Asterisk

Gerd Graumann is the Director of Business Development at LumenVox, a leading provider of speech technology products and has worked for more than 7 years in the areas of speech recognition, audio mining and core speech engine development. Mr. Graumann is a regular speaker at a number of industry conferences, and has worked in the past at Philips, Siemens and Dragon Systems.

Scaling Asterisk® TDM Architecture

Konrad Hammel is a Field Applications Engineer for Sangoma Technologies, the premium provider of PC-based telephony hardware and software products for proprietary and open source based networking and telephony solutions. Some of the projects that Konrad has been involved with at Sangoma include the development of new Sangoma hardware drivers for use with Zaptel, development and installation support of large scale (16+ E1s) Zaptel, and SMB systems. Konrad holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering with a focus in Networking and Programming from Ryerson University, Toronto.

Asterisk and Two Factor Authentication

Clinton James is a recognized leader in information technology and is responsible for the company's technology direction and development. Prior to joining Call One in 2000, Clinton was Senior Consultant at Whitman-Hart, one of the leading Chicago based IT consulting firms. He also served as programmer and primary client liaison to major manufacturing corporations for Wilcox Associates. He received his Bachelors in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.

Asterisk Above 200 Seats - Sweat the Small Stuff; Selling the Flexibility of Asterisk - Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better (and Cheaper)

Bryan M. Johns has spent the last 10 years pioneering business VoIP communications in the Southeastern United States. Over the course of his career, Bryan has been the founder of four network technology start-ups. As a founder and partner in the Atlanta, Georgia-based Shelton | Johns, Bryan evangelizes the business value of media-enabled network platforms and steers corporate and carrier VoIP implementations. Shelton | Johns specializes in design, implementation and knowledge transfer services specific to open source VoIP platforms. The firm supplies its services to organizations with 200 or more users. Shelton | Johns has led implementation and training initiatives at companies such as JBoss / Redhat, Century 21 Real Estate, Life University and other regional and National organizations.

Developing Enterprise Asterisk Applications in .NET

After 2 1/2 years starting a Phoenix, AZ based ITSP, Aaron now manages telecommunications for a large call center. This call center uses 10 Asterisk servers, requiring specially designed, cluster-aware Asterisk applications.

Designing Your First Asterisk Speech Application

SIP From The Trenches: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Kristian Kielhofner has been using Asterisk since 2004 and created AstLinux in late 2004 for his own needs. Many years later, Kristian went on to co-found Star2Star Communications, creator of the world's first fully end to end IP telephony architecture (using SIP, of course). Kristian now spends much of his time dealing with the various SIP devices that make up Star2Star.

Automated Load Testing for SIP Applications

Serge is Director of Engineering at Livevox, the industry's first provider of hosted dialer solutions, as well as traditional on-demand IVR services for the credit and collections industry.

Using Asterisk in a Carrier Scale Unified Messaging Platform

As a founder of Parus Interactive and its principal software architect, Alex is responsible for driving Parus Interactive's leading edge technology. An expert in telecommunications, speech recognition technology and unified communications applications, he has over 20 years of experience as a software system architect and developer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from the Institute of Technical Cybernetics, Academy of Sciences and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnical Institute in the former USSR. Alex has been awarded a number of patents in the field of Unified Communications.

FreePBX FreePBX Internals - Understanding the FreePBX Dialplan

Philippe Lindheimer is the Project Leader and primary Developer of FreePBX, and previously worked in the Engineering industry in a range of technical consulting roles with Fortune 500 Companies for 2 decades. He has given numerous talks on FreePBX and is the co-founder of the Open Telephony Training Seminar series that provides intensive Technical, Sales and Marketing training for the Asterisk/FreePBX telephony market.

Why Cluster?

Leif Madsen is an experienced Asterisk consultant with over 5 years in the VoIP industry, and has presented at all AstriCon conferences since 2004. He is also co-author of the O'Reilly book Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. Leif specializes in clustered Asterisk solutions for ITSPs and call centers, making extensive use of database integration (func_odbc) and resource location technologies (DUNDi). As a member of the grassroots Asterisk community, Leif was involved in the development of the original dCAP certification and Asterisk Training classes, now being offered by Digium. Leif enjoys all things Asterisk and is always finding new and exciting ways to participate in the Asterisk community. Leif currently resides in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Creating Large Scale Asterisk PRI installations using NetBorderTM Express

David Mandelstam is the President and CEO of Sangoma Technologies. In this role as Founder/President/CEO, Mandelstam is responsible for the overall management of Sangoma and its future strategic direction.

PBX_LUA: Taking Asterisk Applications to the Next Level

Clint Oram is one of three co-founders of SugarCRM and co-led the product design and development as well as the customer services team through the first year of business. He is now responsible for managing relations with the Sugar Open Source community, including developer relations and Sugar's community web site properties. Previously, Clint managed SugarCRM's European operations, located in Dublin, Ireland. Clint's 12 years in enterprise software experience spans product management, professional services and software engineering. Prior to co-founding SugarCRM, Clint worked at E.piphany, Octane Software, Hewlett Packard and PG&E.

SIP Survivability and Security

Mr. Percy is Director of Market Development at AudioCodes, a leading provider of Voice over IP Telephony enabling technology. In this role, Mr. Percy is responsible for identifying market trends and building relationships to foster new business opportunities. Mr. Percy joined AudioCodes in 2001 and brings over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications, networking and wireless equipment industries. Mr. Percy publishes "The SIP Invite" blog, is a highly sought-after industry speaker and was recently named to the 100 Top Voices of IP Communications by Internet Telephony magazine.

NAT and Firewall Traversal with STUN/TURN/ICE

Simon Perreault is co-developer and maintainer of the IPv6 port of Asterisk, developer of the IPv6 port of FreeSWITCH, and author of Numb, an implementation of STUN and TURN. He is consultant in network engineering at Viagenie, a consulting and R&D firm specialized in IP networking and VoIP.

Intellectual Property Issues Surrounding the Use of Asterisk

Michelle is the Contracts Manager and In-House Counsel for Digium, Inc. Michelle is responsible for contract drafting and negotiations in areas such as software licensing, partnerships, resellers, OEM, and distributor relationships. She also handle intellectual property issues for Digium such as trademark registration, trademark enforcement, and trademark policy. Michelle received a J.D. from Cumberland School of Law in 2004, and a B.S. in Criminal Justice from the University of North Alabama in 2001. Michelle is married to Kevin Fleming, who also works at Digium, and likes to use words like "notwithstanding the foregoing" and "herewith" in her contracts.

Embracing Embedded Environments for Developmental Success

Mark started out his career at PIKA as a member of the company's software-development team, where he spent over five years designing software architecture for PIKA's clients. In this role, Mark showcased his technical expertise and problem-solving abilities to focus on driver development, ISDN and fax protocols. Two years ago, Mark moved into a field-application-engineering role at PIKA. In this position, Mark works closely with strategic customers to determine their architectural requirements, as well as training and troubleshooting both remotely and on-site. Most recently, in addition to his duties as a field-application engineer, he has been an integral member of the product-development team for the PIKA Warp family of Appliances, contributing to product marketing, customer engagement and audience-targeting aspects of the products, which were made generally available in the summer of 2008. Mark graduated second in his class from the software engineering program at the University of Ottawa.

DUNDi: So Easy A Caveman Can Do It

Jonathan (JR) Richardson Chief Technology officer - Ntegrated Solutions Mr. Richardson is sustaining 12+ years in Telecommunications and 23+ years in the Advanced Electronics field. He has 10 years in the United States Navy; served in 1st Gulf War whilst on the USS Dale, guided Missile Cruiser CG-19, home ported in Jacksonville FL., supervised a crew of technicians responsible for the RADAR and electronic navigation equipment on board the war ship. He accelerated early to management within enlisted ranks and served as electronics and management trainer while overseeing airfield operation and maintenance at the Pensacola, FL Naval Air Station. Mr. Richardson worked at several telecommunications companies within the Operations and Engineering groups as Network Architect, Group Leader and Project Manager managing groups of high level engineering staff, provisioning experts and support personnel and maintaining budgets in excess of $20m. He directly contributed to growth of every company he worked with. Mr. Richardson is a leader in the field of Open Source IP Telephony Systems, and actively speaks at VoIP Conferences showcasing large scale IP Telephony builds within Carrier type environments and has written numerous papers on the subject. Mr. Richardson has several published articles in Industry magazines such as VoIP Magazine. Mr. Richardson is currently extending the scalability, reliability and usability of Open Source VoIP systems at Ntegrated Solutions.

Asterisk and the OpenSER Integration

Ovidiu Sas (VoIP Embedded Inc.) Strong background in Telecom industry: - 7 years in SS7 - 8 years in wireless VoIP and WiMax Involvement with open source: - openser (active developer) - maintainer of several voip and voip related packages for optware feeds (embedded platforms): asterisk, openser, rtpproxy. Located in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Check In Asterisk Into A Hotel

Bachelor and Master Electrical Engineering degree from Sydney University. Worked for Cisco Academy, worked for telecom and internet companies in Sydney. Ahmad spent time working at telecom and internet companies in Oslo, and has worked with Asterisk for 3 years. Ahmad is currently working for a consulting company.

OpenR2 in Asterisk - MFC/R2 Free of Headaches or Your Money Back

Moises Silva works as a Software Engineer for IBM México. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications from the Universidad de Guadalajara. In his spare time he has been the maintainer of the chan_unicall driver for Asterisk 1.4 and is the author of the MFC/R2 signaling library OpenR2. He is currently pushing to support MFC/R2 signaling in chan_zap. He also has made several contributions to Asterisk like Asynchronous AGI and context tracing for channels.

Meeting Telecom Regulations with Asterisk

Nir Simionovich is the founder of the Israeli Asterisk users group and an active Asterisk user and contributor since 2002. Nir is best known for his Asterisk implementation at Tier-1 operators in Israel, and his recent book about AsteriskNOW.

Digium's Asterisk Application Marketplace, or: How to Make Money With Asterisk

Steve Sokol is the product manager for software products at Digium. Previously he was owner and CEO of Sokol & Associates, an Asterisk training and consulting company that was acquired by Digium in June of 2007. He is also co-creator of the AstriCon conference and exhibition. Prior to his discovery of and subsequent disappearance into the world of open source telephony, Sokol developed commercial communications systems including Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and call center management solutions. When not working on Asterisk products he enjoys hiking, mountain climbing and amateur robotics. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his wife Amy and daughter Katie.

Connecting Your Enterprise With Asterisk: IAX to Carriers

Dayton has been using Asterisk since 2004, and is the CTO and founder of Voxter Communications, which entered the market in 2005 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Since its inception, Voxter has been solely using Asterisk to deploy hundreds of managed PBX's in Canada, the USA, and Central America. Dayton has harnessed the great power of Asterisk to provide not only Asterisk phone systems, but VoIP services via IAX and SIP (all driven by asterisk as well!) to his clients in a fully end-to-end solution. Dayton loves developing new integration techniques for Asterisk such as Microsoft Exchange/Blackberry/iPhone integration, and other productivity-enhancing goodies.

Introduction to Unified Communications: The Real Fun Has Barely Begun

Jim is one of the author's of O'Reilly's Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, and an old school PBX guy. Jim is probably a bit of a masochist, which would explain why he got into the telecom business in the first place, and why he now loves Asterisk. Jim is pretty friendly, kinda like a puppy that gets your shoes dirty. His enthusiasm is infectious, but also a little bit frightening if you stand too close. Jim is a partner in Core Telecom Innovations Inc, and iConverged Inc. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three kids, and loves writing, photography, speaking, improv, and old shoes.

AT&T SIP Trunk Compatibility Testing for Asterisk; ISDN-PRI Capabilities and the Asterisk Implementation

Mark A. Vince has held various systems engineering / integration positions in his twenty-plus years with AT&T / Bell Labs. He currently does systems engineering in the Enterprise Architecture area. Dr. Vince has significant PBX / CTI experience involving call center and operations systems. He has been involved with a number of VOIP initiatives, including prototyping novel applications.

Dr. Vince had worked in the nuclear power industry prior to joining AT&T. He has a B.S., M. E. and PhD in Nuclear Engineering and Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in New Jersey.