The Asterisk 123 Seminar is intended to provide a well rounded and informative introduction to the Asterisk Project. All are Welcome! Whether you are managing a team deploying an Asterisk implementation, evaluating potential replacements for a legacy telephony solution thats on its last leg, or just a general Asterisk newbie excited to learn what Asterisk is capable of, then this talk has something to offer you. This allday seminar is broken into multiple sessions, beginning with background information such as the history of Asterisk, followed by methods of installing Asterisk and examples of fundamental configuration for call flow and features such as Voicemail and IVR. Lecture will immediately be followed by a Question and Answer Session.

Jared Smith will share his experiences building contact centers with Asterisk over the past decade. He will discuss topics such as reporting and alerting, common problems and their solutions, and dealing with telecom providers. Hell also show some Asterisk dialplan tips and tricks for improving your Asteriskbased contact center.

The case study of a 3year old, $15M lodging startup using high availability Asterisk to connect offices in four states securely and reliably, using commodity internet connections. Participants will learn about the hardware, software Vyatta, FreePBX, DRBD, service providers and design considerations that make this costeffective system a precious and reliable asset.

Why Asterisk? This presentation will discuss advantages and best practices for Asterisk deployments. It will walk through different possible Asterisk applications and Network architectures. It will discuss the network components and the most cost effective solutions for providing Security, Redundancy, High availability, Routing and Distribution.

Will contracting with a hosted service provider for reduce your overall telecommunications/technology costs? An effective analysis of the decision points must include an examination of all factors relevant to your specific enterprise operations, infrastructure and corporate culture. A vendors ROI calculator alone may not be the best tool for this task. Attendees will hear and discuss: 1. Specific relevant organizational and financial factors that must be considered in short and long term decisions. 2. The results of recent small, medium and large system case studies. 3. Share their own recent experiences and discuss alternatives.

In the last two years there has been an increasing interest in telecommunication services and applications delivered form the cloud. There are plenty of reasons why these offerings are attractive financially and operationally, but theres also plenty of reasons why they might not meet you or your customers expectations. In this session we will cover the most popular use cases and customer profiles for cloud UC and the potential technical and user frustrations that can derail even the most advanced solutions. Come learn what customers are good candidates for UC in the cloud and which ones should spare themselves the agony.

Digium Switchvox has become very popular as a phone system solution for small and midsized customers over the past several years but has only recently gained the attention of enterprises. This session will explore various strategies for designing, deploying, and supporting multisite communications solutions based on Digium Switchvox. We will explore dial plan and user status federation, leveraging Asterisk and the Switchvox Extend API, as well as unified system administration techniques.

Competition is nothing new to the technology arena – it’s what breeds innovation and defines new trends. When new ideas reach the point of becoming disruptive, competition heats up to the point of a tech war, which is where cloud computing has taken the industry, with vendors large and small making a play in the clouds, and businesses of all sizes evaluating their options in the cloud.The idea that any computing and communications resources will be delivered on an “asaService” basis from server farms physically located anywhere in the world represents a powerful shift in computing theory. Despite the hype, media attention, and adoption to date, the cloud is still a relatively new technology with many questions still to be answered. Still, the concept of moving sensitive business information and applications into an offpremises environment managed by a third party is profoundly changing how businesses think about, purchase, and manage technology.What does that change mean? How will providers and users alike handle concerns over privacy and security? Which cloud model will dominate the others? Where does open source fit into the picture? Does cloud mean the end of local computing completely?The only thing that is certain about the future of the cloud is the battle for supremacy will be fierce. TMC’s Editorial Director Erik Linask will lead a panel of cloud computing leaders to find out what it will dominate the cloud landscape and what the next major shift will be, and who will emerge victorious in this battle.

In a datadriven world, what will be the role of the network operators? Will they be “dumb pipe” companies, or will they leverage their unique assets —communications infrastructure, connectivity, market coverage and customer intimacy — to emerge as the hubs of dynamic global ecosystems? Rhetoric on this subject has been replaced with reality. New capabilities and services are being developed and delivered to customers in multiple form factors on multiple screens, and developments like virtualization, WebRTC, and CDNs further threaten the value of the network operator as a traditional service provider. The coming months will require an strategy decision on the part of network owners: Will they cede the high valueadded ground to others or succeed in asserting the imperative of their centrality to creating the future. TMC Senior Editor and 35year veteran of the telecom industry Peter Bernstein will lead this critical discussion with a panel of highprofile vendors with a critical stake to claim in the new service delivery paradigm.

Asterisk is the most established and most successful open source communications engine in the world and that didnt happen by accident! Attend this session for a brief history of the project, followed by a summary of the project as it is right now, swiftly followed by a look at where things are going both in terms of the communications features and functions, and the Asterisk community too. If you are not already part of the community, youll be itching to get involved by the end of this session.

Many organizations are adopting SIP trunking services to save money and improve the flexibility of their communications infrastructure. While the IPbased architecture of Asterisk simplifies connecting to these services without requiring a gateway there are other important considerations for any successful deployment. This session will review networking best practices for security, interoperability, quality of service and ongoing maintenance to help ensure you get the most from your SIP trunking service.

A discussion on methods for deployment planning and IP PBX implementation that reduce labor cost, provide a consistent structure to reduce errors and provide methods to scale with growing customer demands.

Just when you thought that SIP had settled in as the endallbeall of VoIP, along comes a shiny new upstart called WebRTC which is poised to change everything once again. Originated by Google and now under the care and feeding of the IETF, WebRTC aims to add voice, video and data communications capabilities to web browsers. While this may not sound revolutionary, it is.

With the rising sales of mobile devices, both enterprises and SMBs are seeing a surge in the BYOD Bring Your Own Device trend. In fact, 80% of the world is projected to be mobile by the end of 2013. Businesses are supporting mobile devices, allowing employees the freedom to communicate from any device and work from anywhere. SMBs actually have an advantage over enterprises when adopting the latest benefits of UC a key component in a successful BYOD strategy. Hear examples of how companies are developing strategies for supporting personal devices, as well as security concerns; how mobility enhances employee productivity, and how UC is integrated in BYOD. Plus, you’ll see how BYOD can fit into your IT Budget for 2013.