The Astricon Conference
Thursday September 23, 2004

Opening

Steven Sokol and
Olle E. Johansson

Conference keynote:
Asterisk - the leading Open Source PBX today and in the future

Mark Spencer, President, Digium

Mark Spencer is President and founder of Digium, formerly Linux Support Services, Inc., a Huntsville, AL based company focused on the development and support of low-cost, innovative telecommunications hardware and open source software. Mark, originally from Auburn, AL, graduated in 1999 from Auburn University with a BS in Computer Engineering and founded his company in 2000. Mr. Spencer is the original author of GAIM, the widely popular, multi-protocol instant messanging program for Linux, BSD, and Windows. Mark is also responsible for Asterisk, the Open Source PBX for Linux, BSD, and MacOS.

10:00-10:30

Social implications of VoIP and a brief update on regulatory affairs

Ravi Sakaria will be speaking about the implications and importance of VoIP on a social level. In addition, as a commercial provider of consumer VoIP, Voicepulse has been at the center of the regulatory debate surrounding the technology. Sakaria has met with several members of Congress and the FCC, and will provide an update regarding the state of regulatory affairs.

Ravi Sakaria, co-founder and CEO of VoicePulse Inc.

Ravi Sakaria is a veteran technologist with over 15 years experience in the Information Technology field. An expert in the area of network engineering, his vision that Voice over IP is the catalyst for a revolution in the telecommunications industry drives VoicePulse's every day thinking. Prior to co-founding VoicePulse, Sakaria headed a successful IT consulting company, The Aiko Group. The Aiko Group focused on network engineering, Voice over IP quality of service engineering, and network security. Before heading The Aiko Group, Sakaria was Manager of Network Engineering for First Union National Bank. Sakaria's management background, engineering education, and extensive experience in IT service organizations drives VoicePulse's focus on delivering powerful technology to consumers in an easy-to-use format.

VoicePulseis a leading commercial provider of consumer VoIP services. VoicePulse is proud to use Asterisk in several capacities on its network and is a sponsor of Digium's IAXtel network. Sakaria has spoken at VON, SIPSummit, TMCNet and is always happy to extol the virtues of Asterisk!

No doc available - Ravi did speak without slides.

Bye Avaya, Hello Asterisk! ...

This talk describes the deployment of Asterisk for a ~40 person Austin based company. They bought an Avaya PBX on eBay then sold it back on eBay after converting the entire office to Asterisk. Using a local telco PRI and 100% VoIP in house, we utilize most of the features of Asterisk. Remote Field Personnel folks using VPN tunnels with VoIP DID Extensions. VoIP Conferencing instead of pay-for conference bridge services. An investment worth investing in.

Lenny Tropiano, Director, Advanced Technology & Networking, Rocksteady Networks

With nearly 25 years of computer and networking experience, Lenny has taken on the world of convergence with a passion. He spent several years with a videoconferencing manufacturer, followed by over two years as partner in their own VoIP consulting business (www.voiping.com) which he still finds a little time for today. Currently employed with Rocksteady Networks, Inc. (www.rocksteady.com) as their Director of Advanced Technology and Networking. As part of the core-engineering team, he's instrumental in Rocksteady's research and development specifically relating to Voice over IP. For telephony, Rocksteady Networks, Inc. relies now 100% on Asterisk.

A practical implementation of Asterisk for a smaller business

Asterisk can be a suitable replacement for a traditional key system yet deliver capabilities that can exceed that of high-end PBX implementations. Success in business depends on technology choices, feature requirements and supportability. Migration is an issue that can be managed. VoIP over broadband is usable but traditional FXO circuits are mandatory in the implementation. Add the power of Linux to create a single integrated comms platform.

Todd Taylor, Valley Telecomunications

Todd has been following Asterisk for nearly 2 years with a live implementation up & running in a business for approximately 8 months with 0 down time except for scheduled restarts for new releases.

Business Applications for VoiceXML Telephony in an IP Environment

This session will cover a brief overview of VoiceXML, including a discussion of what types of applications are good candidates for self-service automation and an overview of Invores Systems VoiceXML integration to Asterisk.
Extending VoiceXML applications in an IP environment with speech recognition, text to speech synthesis or touchtone can add value to many IP telephony business offerings. Session will also cover extensions to VoiceXML for outdialing, and will offer an overview of inbound and outbound self service automation.

Dan Evans, VP of development, Invores Systems

Dan has over 30 years experience in the design, development and support of real time software systems. Prior to joining Invores, he was responsible for the development of Nortel/Periphonics’ implementation of VoiceXML and CCXML using speech recognition and text to speech. He is an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is responsible for creating the standards for VoiceXML and CCXML. As a founder of Prisym, Inc., he developed the software that powered Citicorp’s Enhanced Telephone (ET), the original Citicorp online banking product. As VP of Development, Dan brings to Invores experience and knowledge that are both practical and visionary.

Asterisk in the Free World Dialup

Open source made Free World Dialup a reality and allowed FWD® to be the first to provide effective VoIP service to the world. Asterisk is FWD’s primary feature server software and it allows pulver.com to quickly create services for FWD users as well as various consulting clients. Ed discusses this non- traditional role for asterisk and how it has been used to cost-effectively deliver interesting features to customers.

Ed Guy, Chief Scientist, Pulver.com

Ed is a seasoned Computer Systems Architect with broad experience in network-based, large-scale & highly available systems. He led the Free World Dialup development team to deliver a system capable of supporting over 200,000 subscribers and also designed and deployed VoIP systems for major telephony carriers. Prior to Pulver.com, he was Founder and CTO of EMC Software, a project consulting and software development firm, where he engineered cable and DSL-based VoIP Systems. Ed holds a doctoral degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University where he performed distributed computing research.

Using Asterisk in a Large Scale Carrier Environment

Asterisk can be tailored to perform many functions needed for a carrier to provide VoIP services to an existing customer base. With a proper design and growth strategy, Asterisk can be ultimately scalable for any amount of customers. An Asterisk foundation of VoIP can be easily customized for local specific needs for the customer based.

Jonathan R Richardson, Technology Visionary, Engineering for the Masses

JR entered the field of communications electronics in 1987. Built fiber based transport networks, telephony stitched networks, Internet Service Provider networks. Researching and developing VoIP services for 2 years. Held leadership positions in 2 CLEC companies, 1 DLEC regonal DSL company and 1 MSO in Business Services Group

What If There Were No Service Providers?

It is a remarkable time for voice over the internet (VoIP). With voice now firmly established as a mainstream internet application, previously unthinkable outcomes, such as the demise of artificially high prices and monopoly control, become increasingly plausible. This presentation discusses some of the issues and drivers of VoIP adoption and challenges some commonly held assumptions.

David Beckemeyer, Distinguished Research Engineer,
Earthlink (NASDAQ: ELNK)

Mr. Beckemeyer joined EarthLink in 1995. He established and led the team that essentially rebuilt EarthLink's network and systems infrastructure from the ground up. As CTO he oversaw significant growth of the company, incorporating changes that greatly improved its security and efficiency, and scaling the company's Internet services.
Mr. Beckemeyer is currently a member of the Research and Development team at EarthLink, where he pursues various research initiatives and provides strategic advisory to executive management.

The hitchhikers guide to Asterisk
- a presentation of the Asteriskdocs.org project

One year ago, Asterisk had very poor, if any, documentation. At the same time, the code and user base both started to grow and the need for proper documentation was getting high. Leif is one of the founders of the Asteriskdocs.org project and will cover the current status of this project and include information on how you can participate.

Leif Madsen (blitzrage) and Jared Smith

Jared Smith is a Linux systems administrator with several years of telephony and voice-over-IP experience. While working for a previous employer, he rolled out one of the world’s largest Asterisk installations. That installation alone saved the company $20,000 (USD) a month, and paid for itself in less than five months. Jared is also responsible for inventing a feature in Asterisk known as “IAX2 trunking”, allowing concurrent calls between two Asterisk installations to minimize IP overhead, and thus increase the number of simultaneous calls over a particular link. Jared has also been instrumental in creating the infrastructure for the Asterisk Documentation Project. He is an active participant in the project and has written a good portion of current edition.

Asterisk on FreeBSD - a status report

Asterisk's support of FreeBSD and other *BSD systems has improved during the spring of 2004. We have working drivers for some Digium cards and work progresses on others. There has also been a lot of code changes in order to improve support of BSD systems.

This talk covers what did it take to get it working, what's complete, what's in progress and what's deferred for the future. The resources, developer interests and community consensus about what is most needed on FreeBSD will be compared for each.

Rich Murphey, CEO, White Oak Labs

Dr. Murphey holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and has fifteen years of experience in software development as an author, architect, product line manager, a business development liaison and board member. He specializes in rapid execution for emerging markets.
Dr. Murphey is best known for open-source contributions as a co-founder of the FreeBSD Unix operating system and the Xfree86 Project window system. He served for 12 years on each project on both the board of directors and the core development team.
Rich currently serves on the boards of the XFree86 Project, Inc. and Infragard Houston. He is a member of the ACM, IEEE, WISA, ISSA, SANS and CIS. He is a frequent speaker at national conferences, most recently on technical advancements in intrusion prevention software. His main interests are operating systems and Intrusion Detection Systems.

This talk was cancelled and replaced with Eric Hearnez from Telic.net

10 things you did not know that you wanted to know about Asterisk

Asterisk is a feature-rich telephony application development platform. Aside from “normal” PBX functions, there are a lot of interesting things you can do, and things you propably shouldn’t bother with doing, with Asterisk.

This talk, delivered by two well-known Asterisk gurus, gives you a deeper insight into the mystery of Asterisk - the Open Source Voice Applications Development Toolkit.

Brian K. West and Josh Roberson

No slides available from speakers.