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Partnership Conference Series Program Coordinator & Host
Dr. Tamas Michel Koplyay

TalkSwitch
Tim Welch, Vice President Sales

Making VoIP Easy for SMBs
Nearly everyone agrees that Voice over IP is the future of telecommunications. Despite this, few phone system developers have focused their VoIP efforts on developing products specifically suited for the fastest growing business segment - small and medium sized companies (which make up 90% of all business in North America). One of the reasons is that small businesses are notoriously hard to reach and difficult to serve. However, for companies with vision and patience, the small business market can offer tremendous rewards. While cost savings are the primary drivers for small businesses looking to implement VoIP, there are a number of other key considerations and benefits. Find out: why small business owners consider VoIP; what questions to ask to ensure the VoIP deployment will go smoothly; and, what VoIP can do to transform small business.

Parliant Corporation
Kevin Ford, CEO

Business Opportunities in an immature VoIP Market
VoIP shows great promise, but it is not as mature as many pundits would have you believe. This presentation will point out its strengths and weaknesses, helping you to avoid the pit falls, and point to business opportunities for you to provide products and services to help other do the same.

Coffee Break

Alcatel
Rob Hemmerich, Director, Solutions Marketing

Managed Business Communication Services Deliver Enterprise Value
The move towards VoIP is a given. How can service providers continue to deliver value to enterprises in such an environment? The answer is for service providers to enter into a new relationship with their enterprise customers and deliver managed communication services. With managed communication services, service providers can deliver, and are delivering, all of the requirements demanded by their enterprise customers: a consistent business communication environment that can be delivered to any device, over any network.

VoIP: No Longer Telecom As Usual!
The presentation will discuss how the Internet Protocol revolution has obliterated barriers to entry into telephony around the world, including Canada, requiring equipment manufacturers, service providers, customers, policy makers and regulators to re-think and re-examine traditional ways of supplying, consuming and regulating communication services.

In addressing the above, the presentation will describe: the nature of competitive entry in the VoIP/telephony market; what it means to businesses and consumers; and, the applications that VoIP enables today, and those it will enable tomorrow.

Public Works and Government Services Canada
Tom Wilson, Product Manager - Network Applications and Services, Information Technology Services Branch (ITSB)

A Converged Communications Service for the Government of Canada
VoIP is making significant headlines in the trade press, however, to-date it has seen very limited adoption by departments and agencies of the Canadian government.

Through direct experience, and by accounts of other organizations, it was concluded by PWGSC that convergence of voice, data and multimedia services to an IP infrastructure is a viable strategy, and that it is expected to prevail in the future.

Convergence to an IP infrastructure for voice and data services is expected to enable Government of Canada (GC) departments to realize benefits from new and future converged applications and service management, in return for an investment in organizational and infrastructure changes.

Prior to establishing an IP-based service that will scale to Government of Canada requirements, it is essential for PWGSC to secure an understanding of near-term benefits, anticipated costs of deployment, organizational implications and associated risks.

• Which government operational scenarios most likely to be derive benefit from converged service deployments?
  
• How will organizational roles need to change to support voice as an application on the LAN?
  
• What can the Government really expect to achieve, by replacement of time-proven TDM-based telephone service with a converged service, and when?
  
• How should a nation-wide service be procured and delivered?

To address these and other questions, PWGSC plans to implement a pilot of the Converged Communication Service resembling the model on which PWGSC could build a Government of Canada-wide shared hosted service.

This session will explore some of the business development challenges faced by PWGSC, and how it proposes to address them through the pilot.

Objectworld Communications Corp.
David Levy, President and CEO

IT Telephony - Changing the Way We Think of Convergence
Everyone understands VoIP means media convergence. Although many telephony services such as unified messaging, unified communications, interactive voice response and fax require close integration with IT, VoIP products and services today are still dealt with separately from information technology. In particular VoIP business communications is still separately controlled and administered. VoIP is not integrated into IT environments. There are no longer practical technology barriers to integrating business communications into the IT data centre of any organization. Major changes in technology such as the enormous power of low cost computers, the adoption and acceptance of SIP to implement VoIP by many manufacturers and the suitability of Microsoft's Windows server system have made convergence a reality. The benefits of business convergence into IT are its low cost, simplified deployment, easier administration and improved operations. This presentation will show why full convergence of business communications into the IT data centre will eradiate the traditional PBX, leveling the playing field for all companies regardless of size.