Speakers include Avaya, Bandwidth.com, Broadvox, Commetrex, Dialogic, FaxCore, GrandStream, Ingate Systems, Intertex Data AB, Media5, Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC), ShoreTel, The SIP Center, The SIP Forum, Texas A&M University, Unified Communication Interoperability Forum (UCIF) and VOIPSA.  Joel Maloff of Maloff NetResults/Phone.com will present and also moderate the sessions.

Come join us, room 9C at the Austin Convention Center.

SEMINAR SCHEDULE

Tuesday, September 13

Unified Communications Day (Certificate Program)

9:30am – Welcome Remarks

10:00am – The VoIP Net: From POTS to Quality Unified Communications Globally

11:00am – TOWN HALL MEETING: Unified Communications

12:00pm – Video Calling: The OVCC Initiative

12:30pm – OVCC, Network Architecture, Interworking and Billing Model

1:00pm – Fax-over-IP

2:00pm – HD Voice and Video

3:00pm – Global Perspective on Unified Communications

Wednesday, September 14

SIP Trunking Professional Development Program (Certificate Program)

9:00am – SIP Trunking: A Global Perspective

11:00am – CASE STUDY BLOCK: Lessons Learned

12:00pm – SIP Trunk Deployment Demo

1:00pm – Mobility: Connecting Remote Workers

2:00pm – TOWN HALL MEETING: SIP, UC and Security

3:00pm – SIP Trunking in the Cloud, or Own Your Own?

Thursday, September 15

SIP Trunk-UC Boot Camp

9:00am – SIP Trunking and Unified Communications for the Sales and MarketingProfessional

10:00am – SIP Trunk “Basic Training” with Ingate

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

Essential reading on SIP, Ingate's new e-book is a resource guide on SIP trunking, SIP security, VoIP, Unified Communications and more.  

A case study illustrating the ROI of SIP trunking achieved by Kool Smiles, a children's dental management practice with offices across the US, is included.

Topics covered in the e-book include:

Download "What is SIP Trunking?" for free: http://www.tmcnet.com/tmc/whitepapers/white-paper.aspx?id=4562&title=What+is+SIP+Trunking%3f+eBook

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

To address the need for information on the what, why and how of UC and SIP trunking, we are revamping the popular ITEXPO seminar series to offer the new Unified Communications: SIP Trunking, Voice, Video and More at ITEXPO West 2011, September 13-15, 2011.

The seminars are free to all ITEXPO attendees.

This three-day educational seminar series provides in-depth information on the wide breadth of applications falling under the UC umbrella.  Sessions will cover:

• Fax-over-IP
• HD Video 
• Mobility
• Hosted Unified Communications
• Case Study Blocks: Lessons Learned
• How-To Session: Building Your Own SIP Trunk
• “Fast Draw” interactive SIP trunking session
• A Global Look at UC; SIP Trunking in Latin America
• UC and SIP Trunking for the Sales and Marketing Professional
• Town Hall Meetings and SIP Trunk Boot Camp

Speakers will once again feature visionaries driving the industry.

Interested in speaking?  Contact me directly at steve@ingate.com

For more information visit http://www.ingate.com/Unified%20Communication_Austin_2011.php

Free VIP passes can be obtained here: https://www.tmcnet.com/scripts/itexpo/tx11/itfall11reg.aspx?theplan=D

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

ROI in Two Years: Matt described that the payback for the enhanced service model was less than two years and the return on investment was more than adequate to meet the requirements of the company.

The next steps are to integrate this with CRM and to support mobile VoIP and then to communication enable business processes for the customer.

Matt offered 5 tips for evolving to UC:
1. Make sure the customer LAN and the WAN is UC ready minimizing jitter, delay and packet loss
a. Use a networking monitoring tool or service to evaluate the network on a hop-by-hop basis to see where issues may be encountered
2. Use SIP and find a reputable service provider than can offer quality of service
3. Understand how people work and communicate
4. Evaluate multiple UC vendors and be willing to have a multi-vendor solution
5. Phase in the deployment and use an implementation specialist

"SIP is the glue for Unified Comms and Ingate makes it all work for interoperability and security," he concluded. "Today Ingate ties together UC components; tomorrow it will tie together UC systems."

The SIP Trunk-UC Summit continues throughout today and tomorrow (Friday) in room A208 at ITEXPO. Stop by, meet the Ingate team, talk to our esteemed speakers, learn about SIP trunking and UC.

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

This morning our panelists for the Town Hall Meeting engaged in a very lively discussion about what Unified Communications really means.  Several made the point that UC is focused on changing the way that enterprises do business, unlike SIP trunking which is replicating the features and methods that have been employed on legacy telephony systems.  The panel made the observation that consumer experiences with services such as Facebook and capabilities such as FaceTime are what drive new ways of conducting business.  The promise of UC is that it will change the paradigm so that employees are more productive, can work in different ways and different locations.

Video delivery to the desktop was a hot topic.  Karl Stahl of Intertex Data AB made the point that the technology exists today to do peer-to-peer video over the high quality IP networks that exist and that with Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) deployed at the edge, carriers can capture the duration of video calls and potentially use that information to charge customer for enhanced usage on a per video call basis.

The panelists agreed that the technology exists today to expand our communications experience to include voice, video, Instant Messaging, Presence, and other services that enhance the user experience and result in higher productivity at a relatively low cost.

New SIP Trunk-UC Summit sessions Feb 2-4 on Fax-over-IP, Unifying the Distributed Workforce, case studies and more. Also FREE to attend.

Join Aastra, Broadvox, ShoreTel and many, many others — including VOIPSA, EarthLink Business, UCIF, Commetrex, FaxCore, Maloff NetResults, Bandwidth.com, SIP Forum, Unwired Revolution, Market Strategy & Analytics Partners and Intertex Data AB.

For more info click here.

See you in sunny Miami Beach!

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

• Building for ROI
• Case Studies
• Service Provider Perspective - US and European Views
• How to Sell SIP
• Town Hall Meeting: SIP, UC and Security

• Fax-over-IP
• Legacy PBX/PSTN and SIP Trunking
• The Future for Service Providers in a UC-Enabled World
• The ROI of SIP Trunking and UC

• Deploying SIP Trunks - Getting it Right the First Time
• SIP Trunk "Basic Training" with Ingate

There has been a vigorous debate sparking up the Internet recently asking: "Does an Enterprise need a Session Border Controller (SBC) as part of its implementation of VoIP?"

The short answer is a resounding "YES!"

An Enterprise SBC is a crucial element in enabling and securing SIP deployments.

One common misconception about E-SBCs, and a question we receive often, is: why should a customer purchase a separate E-SBC when their service provider likely has their own? Won't the service provider's E-SBC provide adequate security?

The answer is a wholehearted, "no." Although the service provider may have its own SBC, it is in place to protect the service provider network, not the customer. An SBC at the customer edge assures that the customer's network is fully protected from any potential breach or attack.

And we also hear the question: I am getting my service from a provider that offers an MPLS connection directly from their cloud. Doesn't this mean that I am completely safe and don't need the SBC at my site?

Again, the answer is no.

While MPLS connections do offer advantages, at a price, over an open Internet connection, they do not guarantee security for the customer. Recently heard a great analogy: a submarine is partitioned into several spaces, and each space or compartment can be sealed from the others with a watertight bulkhead door. Why? Because in the event that one compartment is breached in battle, the other compartments will stay dry and the boat and crew will have a chance to survive.

The same is true in the VoIP installation. Placing an E-SBC at the edge of the enterprise network, the firm can install its IP-PBX on the inside of the network and not give it a public IP address. This is the first step in implementing a secure SIP trunking installation.

Once that is done, the enterprise can then use the tools on the SBC to ensure that only the traffic they want, from whom they wish to receive it, is permitted. With the extensive set of settings available on an Ingate SBC this means that there is a great deal of fidelity that can be worked into the installation, at an affordable price.

But the E-SBC can do much more than this also. For example, the Ingate SBC called the SIParator can:

Normalize the SIP signaling between the IP-PBX at the customer site and the service provider's network. This allows any IP-PBX to be connected to any service provider easily and quickly.

Enable disaster recovery. In the event a customer's main office goes down, the E-SBC can reroute SIP traffic to a secondary office to keep business up and running. The SBC can also be used to shift traffic to alternate service providers, or to load balance to multiple PBXs on the customer's network.

Intrusion Detection/Prevention (IDS/IPS) is also important, as it enables the E-SBC to detect DoS attacks based on SIP, and to block malicious SIP signaling packets designed to attack certain SIP phones, servers or other devices on the enterprise LAN. This secures the enterprise network as the E-SBC handles the attacks while the servers and other SIP devices in the network can still be used and calls can be routed via alternate connections.

In short, the E-SBC is an integral part of a good Voice-over-IP implementation providing the necessary tools to enable SIP and the features to eliminate vulnerabilities.

LIVE Blogging from ITEXPO in Miami - Feb 03, 2011

Dialogic to Provide "Any-to-Any" PBX Connectivity for SIP Trunking
Plans to Incorporate Ingate SIP Trunking Technology for New Enterprise Border Element Solution

ITEXPO EAST, MIAMI BEACH, FL - January 20, 2010 -Dialogic Corporation ("Dialogic"), a global provider of world-class products and technologies for media and signal processing, announced today that it has entered into an agreement with Ingate® Systems ("Ingate") which allows Dialogic to incorporate the award-winning SIP Trunking software module from Ingate into a new enterprise border element designed to connect virtually any SIP trunk with virtually any PBX, to facilitate seamless SIP trunk deployments in legacy TDM and hybrid PBX environments, as well as new SIP-based PBX systems.

"PBX's are transitioning from the traditional TDM PBX's to hybrid PBX's, IP-PBXs, and Unified Communications solutions creating a heterogeneous TDM/SIP trunk environment and there is a significant opportunity to provide connectivity and security between public and private networks," said Franz-Josef Eberle, Vice President and General Manager for the Enterprise Market Group at Dialogic. "Dialogic is meeting this growing demand by combining Ingate's proven SIP Trunking technology with Dialogic's extensive PBX and PSTN media gateway technology."

The Ingate SIP Trunking software module provides enterprise session border control along with the advanced routing capabilities necessary to connect SIP trunks to enterprise networks and branch offices by employing Ingate's proxy-based traversal and security technology. The SIP Trunking software also is designed to resolve interoperability issues between service providers' SIP services and the SIP-based systems being deployed inside corporate data networks today.

Dialogic's media gateway technologies provide the protocols and interfaces necessary to connect with a wide variety of legacy telephony equipment and networks, both TDM and IP. The new enterprise border element from Dialogic will combine the functions normally found in a media gateway and an enterprise session border controller into a single product. The result will be a solution that is designed to connect virtually any trunk with virtually any PBX, thus helping to resolve the connectivity issues with the heterogeneous environment.

"SIP trunking has been proven to provide a rapid return on investment. The Dialogic solution will open this opportunity to enterprises with mixed PBX environments, including those using traditional PBXs," said Steven Johnson, President of Ingate Systems. "Dialogic's extensive reach will further drive SIP trunk adoption, which also primes enterprises for using all SIP communications including Unified Communications."

Dialogic plans to make a first set of enterprise border elements available later this year with product configurations offering SIP trunking legacy PBX connectivity via PRI/E1/T1 and ISDN BRI.

Dialogic will be presenting the "Legacy PBX/PSTN and SIP Trunking" session with Ingate at the SIP Trunk Summit at the ITEXPO, on January 21, 2010 in room A108/A109 at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Florida.

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