The conference agenda

Conference schedule

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

the fwdOUT architecture

fwdOUT(tm) is a non-commercial service that enables Asterisk(tm) System users to find one another and share their phone lines.
The service is completely asterisk-based and allows users to place free calls nearly anywhere in the world as long as they let other users use their phone line. In this session, Ed will describe the central server's architecture in detail and discuss some of the tradeoffs that were made during the design and implementation.

Ed Guy, Pulver Innovations

Ed is a seasoned Computer Systems Architect with broad experience in network-based, large-scale & highly available systems. He is currently the Chief Scientist at pulver.com where he developed Blue Lava Software's Open Source collection, designed and implemented fwdOUT, and originally led the Free World Dialup team to deliver a system capable of supporting over 200,000 subscribers. He 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 and softphones.
Ed holds a doctoral degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University where he performed distributed computing research.

Scaling Asterisk

How to scale Asterisk to thousands of simultaneous calls. Appropriate levels of failover and redundency, such as interface board strategies, server failover strategies, and using routers for carrier grade transcoding.

Paul Mahler, founder and Chief Technical Officer, Signate

Paul is the author of the book "VoIP Telephony with Asterisk", the first comprehensive guide to Asterisk. A specialist for three decades in the architecture and implementation of mission-critical business systems, Mahler's experience encompasses telephony, relational databases, and UML and model driven architectures. His clients have included Air Touch, AT&T, Pacific Bell, Verizon and Visa. He began his career as the founder of Horizon Software systems, the first software applications developer for the UNIX operating system.

Mahler has a BA, at honors, from the University of California at Berkeley in Philosophy of Science. He completed four years in the Ph.D. program of Bio-physics at U.C. Berkeley and the graduate program of Medical InformationSciences at U.C. San Francisco.

Asterisk Call Center Strategies

Asterisk a new phenomenon in the telecom sector. Learn how call center can benefit from this new reality.

Georges Karam, Aheeva

Georges Karam is a founding member of Aheeva. As CEO, Mr. Karam is responsible for strategic alliances.
Mr. Karam brings solid expertise in Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), Interactive Voice Response (IVR) as well as telecommunications & telephony protocols.
Prior to the creation of Aheeva, Mr. Karam has held various positions at Univoc and Elix where he specialized in computer telephony.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences from the University of Quebec in Montreal and a MBA from HEC Montreal.

How to slash your PSTN bill whilst increasing the functionality of your telephone trunks
(Use of IP Trunks to replace conventional PSTN Services)

The ability to interwork with conventional Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) an essential feature of any modern VoIP soft switch. The conventional way of interfacing to the PSTN invloves interconnection via analog or digital trunk lines from a local service provider. However, by implementing an IP based trunk connection to the PSTN, trunk costs can be dramatically reduced whilst improving the flexibility and functionality of the service.

In this presentation James will describe the features and functionality of IP based trunk services compared with conventional PSTN interconnects. Following this presentation you will want to port your existing PSTN telephone numbers to a VoIP provider and discontinue your expensive conventional PSTN services!

James Body. Technical Architect / Product Director, Call UK

James Body is responsible for product development at Call UK, a UK based licenced telco which specialises in provision of VoIP centred PSTN services. Following graduation for Queen Mary College, University of London and 20 years as a Regular Officer in the Royal Corps of Signals (UK Army), James 'retired' to focus on implementing VoIP based 'New Telephony' systems. He was responsible for SIPCall, the first UK public SIP<>PSTN system and is co-founder of Gossiptel, a leading consumer based VoIP offering. A founder member of the UK Internet Telephony Providers Association (ITSPA), he has been closely involved with the implementation and regulation of new internet based telephony systems for past four years.

Asternic, the flash operator panel

This presentation will be about the Flash Operator panel and my experiences dealing with the AMI. Past, present and future of FOP and an overview of what can and can't be done (yet) with the manager interface.

Nicolás Gudiño, Partner, House Internet S.R.L.

Co-founded the company in 1991 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Started selling shareware on floppy disks, then transitioned into a BBS and now became an ITSP and IT consultancy firm. Studied Music at the Conservatory, self-thaugh in computers and technology. Working with Asterisk for about two years now, contributed some small features and patches and developed the Flash Operator Panel.

Threats and Opportunities for PBX Manufacturers and Telephony VARs in the Age of Asterisk

This presentation will demonstrate how Asterisk can be leveraged into increased business opportunities for both PBX manufacturers and telephony VARs. It will discuss the drawbacks of developing proprietary PBXs, in contrast to Asterisk’s feature-rich, open platform. For telephony VARs, it will illustrate how Asterisk can provide freedom from PBX manufacturer exclusivity and guarantee a steady revenue stream.

Israel "Izzy" Gal, President - Xorcom, Ltd

Mr. Israel Gal (“Izzy”), is co-founder and President of Xorcom, Ltd., a contributing member of the Asterisk community, which develops software and hardware for the open source Asterisk PBX environment. Mr. Gal also founded Better On-line Solutions, a publicly-traded company (NASDAQ:BOSC) that develops high technology connectivity, communication, networking and output management solutions. Mr. Gal has a Bachelors of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (the "Technion").

AstLinux

An introduction to AstLinux.

Kristian Kielhofner

Developing Real Time Web-Telephony Applications with Asterisk

You've got some Linux boxes running Asterisk, Apache, perl, php, MySQL, and a variety of other good tools. It's a natural enough idea to try to interface Asterisk with your web applications, but when it comes to actually doing it, myriad challenges become apparent.

What's a good way to interface between a web app and the manager API? Should you use a manager proxy? What about XML-RPC or SOAP options? How do you get back synchronous results? How do you tie Asterisk information back to web session state? Should I use AGI, Manager, or CLI?

We'll look at some answers to these questions as well as trade stories about how different people have solved these very challenging problems, and take a look at some actual web-based applications that utilize Asterisk in creative and powerful ways.

David C. Troy, President/CEO, popvox, LLC

David Troy is a technology entrepreneur. He founded a worldwide mail order/retail computer sales outlet at age 14 in 1986, and transitioned into the Internet Service Provider market in 1995. In 1995, he founded ToadNet, a prominent ISP in the mid-Atlantic area. He was also an initial investor in Core Communications, a profitable CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) based in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2004, he sold ToadNet to Landmark Communications (parent company of the Weather Channel, Trader Publications, and several other media properties) in an all-cash deal.

David has over 20 years experience with programming, systems, and software design and implementation. While at ToadNet he developed and implemented several pioneering software systems, including integrated provisioning, CRM, telephony, and management systems. He has experience with a wide range of networking, software, and hardware platforms. David now has two years of experience coding with the Asterisk platform. He contributed several feature enhancements to Asterisk's app_queue Queueing application (hold time estimation and announcements and call queue position to name two), and has also contributed several helper scripts that are now in CVS, including "qview.pl" and "simpleproxy.pl".

He lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and two children, and is currently the Founder and CEO of Popvox, LLC, an IP Voice Application Service Provider.

Organizational Approach to Administering an Asterisk PBX

Out of the box, Asterisk places a premium on technical knowledge, including telephony expertise. Typical organizations are not going to have these skills in-house but still need to manage their PBX, making a less technical alternative to Asterisk administration desirable. The Vonik Asterisk GUI Project, an open source initiative, was formed to build software to meet this requirement. At the start of this project we studied how a non-technical organization administers technical resources. Administrative actions are generally accomplished by invoking relationships between the technical asset and the users, groups, or organization as a whole. A key to implementing this approach has been the use of database technology to present views of the data that make sense to a non-technical user. While this approach does not entirely eliminate the need for technical expertise when certain advanced operations need to be performed, we have been pleased with the power we have been able to program into a user friendly GUI. This presentation will discuss the technical challenges and implementation of this approach and compare the resulting software with a typical Asterisk approach.

Ben Hubbard, Vonik LLC

Ben Hubbard leads the technical team at Vonik LLC and oversees its daily operations. He became interested in Asterisk when his company moved into a new building, requiring a new PBX. Prior to founding Vonik, Ben served as Chief Software Architect for Mase Technologies where he helped design and implement a parameterized approach to data security auditing for UNIX systems. Ben graduated with highest honors from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in Computer Engineering.

Selling Asterisk solutions

We would like the opportunity to share our experiences selling Asterisk solutions with other companies. The pitfalls we have found and the massive opportunities available to small companies choosing to sell Asterisk. Our company is currently undergoing a rebranding and marketing exercise to increase market share and steal business from existing telecomms installers.
In order to do this, we have learned some interesting things about both our business and about the telecomms equipment market in general. We believe that our experiences will benefit other companies in the same line of business and the Asterisk community in general.

Nicholas Barnes, Senior Partner, BCN Telecommunications

BCN Telecommunications a division of BCN, running for 4 years. A small company servicing the SME market and providing only Asterisk based solutions. Having spent the last four years in the IT consultancy market, we have found our position eroded both by customers' demands for lower and lower priced equipment and services and the increasing availability of school leavers willing to provide services at this price point. We stepped into the Telecomms market one year ago and this now forms over 90% of our revenue stream.

IAX and SIP from a phone phone vendor's point of view

The eternal discussion in the Asterisk community seems to be "SIP" or "IAX" - or both? How does a phone vendor look at it when they make a decision?

Dr. Christian Stredicke, Founder, SNOM

Dr. Christian Stredicke, born 1968 in Germany, studied computer science from 1989 to 1992 and business administration from 1992 to 1996 at the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. He had a five-year teaching and research position at the Institute for Technical Computer Science at the Technical University, where he received his Ph.D. in Engineering in 1997. After his university time, he did various consulting projects at Arthur D. Little and at snom. He received the Erwin Stefan Price for his outstanding short and successful studies in computer science in 1992. Dr. Stredicke founded snom in 1996, where he is now as a member of the executive board responsible for technology. His interests are computer telephony, electronic design, accounting and taxes.