[February 23, 2005]

Know Thy Keynoters: Kevin Beatty

By David Sims, TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

On Thursday, February 24 th at 5:20 p.m. Kevin Beatty will deliver his keynote address to ITEXPO.

Kevin Beatty, Director of Marketing for NEC Unified Solutions, Inc. is responsible for developing and implementing corporate marketing functions for all areas of the company including products and services, supplier relationships and sales strategies.

He’s a veteran of the telecommunications industry, having held senior management positions with corporations such as GTE Supply, where he was responsible for the development of the Service Provider, Contractor, and Enterprise Markets. Additionally, he directed the overall management of Lucent’s Market Development Program for GTE Supply’s distribution channel.

NEC’s been busy in VoIP recently. Earlier this month they announced the latest component in its Univerge architecture, the Univerge SV7000 Multi-Purpose Server Linux-based IP voice communications platform.

Developed for the SMB market, the new platform is marketed as reducing the entry-level point for deploying voice and data over a single network.

“Almost 6% of medium-sized businesses currently use an IP PBX, with an expected penetration of over 20% by 2008,” said Michael Lauricella, vice president, SMB Communications Research, AMI-Partners.” “Cost of deployment and skepticism of the technology are two of the major factors that need to be addressed to meet that level of penetration.”

NEC's Univerge SV7000 MPS is designed to reduce the average per port cost of implementing a pure IP solution by approximately 40%. The SV7000 MPS provides the same features, function and terminal operation as its SV7000 counterpart.

Also in early February NEC announced an agreement with Qovia Inc. to provide VoIP monitoring and management from the network to the end points for NEC’s Electra Elite IPK system.

The Electra Elite IPK is a platform for voice and data network convergence. Allowing customers to choose between deploying traditional circuit-switched technology, VoIP, or any combination, all from one system, the Electra Elite IPK has been popular in the SMB market.

NEC’s partnership with Qovia is supposed to deliver a complete suite of VoIP management tools and applications to its IPK customers based on Qovia's VMMS product. With features including administration and discovery tools, call quality and UPS monitoring, active packet testing, configuration management and real-time notification, the IPK VoIP Management suite allows network administrators to identify and resolve issues in real- time before user quality is affected.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.