Unified Communications

Stephen has over 20 years of experience in the network and telecommunications industry. He is currently serving as Mitel's Vice President of U.S. Systems Engineering where his team of over 60 professionals provide consultative design and engineering support for Mitel’s complete product and applications portfolio to Mitel’s business partners and U.S.-based sales force. Since joining Mitel in 1996, he has served in many roles ranging from technical support, pre-sales engineering, business development and strategic alliance management where he has consistently contributed to optimizing performance levels, driving business growth, facilitating key alliances, and defining and implementing strategic technology driven solutions.

Stephen began his career in communications in 1990 after a three year commitment to the U.S. Army. You can view his public profile on Linked In at http://www.linkedin.com/in/tostephenbrown and follow him on twitter stephenbrown301

Jamie Stark looks after voice, networking and interoperability for Microsoft Lync. Jamie has spent the last 15 Years in Enterprise Software for Telephony, Contact Center, and Enterprise PBX systems and is a frequent speaker at Microsoft’s TechED and Worldwide Partner Conferences and Enterprise Connect. Jamie can be reached at jastark@microsoft.com and tweets sporadically @nomorephones.

Arik Elberse is Director of Collaboration Solutions Architecture for Cisco’s global, market-leading Collaboration portfolio. Arik’s previous responsibilities have included Director of Product Management for Cisco’s global UC Video strategy and solutions and Director of Product Management for Cisco’s global Desktop Unified Communications portfolio.
Arik has more than 20 years experience in the ICT industry and prior to joining Cisco in early 2007, Arik held a variety of senior positions, incl. CTO for Multimedia Applications with Nortel (now Avaya), as well as establishing and running his own Irish-nationwide Business Consultancy service. He is also the inventor of several granted and pending patents in the ICT space.
Arik was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands and moved to Ireland with his parents at a young age. He now lives in Galway, Ireland where he is married with 2 wonderful boys and where they enjoy the wonderful surrounding nature, scenery and hill walking.

Currently, Mr. Landry is Senior Vice President for NEC where he oversees the company’s product strategies, go-to-market activities and strategic alliances surrounding its Unified Communications and Collaboration portfolio. Prior to NEC, Mr. Landry held senior positions in companies that incuded Sphere Communications, 3Com’s CommWorks Corporation, and U.S. Robotics.where he led product management, marketing and business development. His career is founded on engineering in the tele and data communications sectors with experience in hardware systems and software applications.
Todd’s diverse background in engineering, marketing, and business, combined with his knowledge of software and system architectures and a strong customer emphasis create a unique foundation of knowledge, which he has utilized as a speaker in numerous forums, panels and keynotes. He has received numerous awards, including multiple new product achievement awards, product of the year awards, advertising achievement awards, and holds two patents in the area of communications and wireless systems.

Nancy joined Sonus in 2011 as Vice President and General Manager of the Communications Applications Solutions Division. Her mission is to help businesses improve the way

they communicate using Cloud-based session management solutions. Her energetic style and her more than 20 years of service, sales and marketing experience in the computer systems, networking and telecommunications markets are helping her accomplish this goal, which will be critical to Sonus’ long term growth strategy.
Before Sonus, Nancy held roles as:
- Vice President of Unified Communications Marketing; Area Vice President of Sales; Director of New Business Development for Global Managed Services; Senior Director of Global Sales Enablement at Avaya
- Prior to Avaya, Nancy launched and managed a business providing Application Service Provider (ASP) and outsourcing services to e-businesses
- An early creator of Cloud computing solutions, Nancy is very familiar with the pros and cons of these hot new delivery models. She’s a tireless customer advocate who

understands how to improve their businesses through the use of effective communications. She says she never tires of walking, including walking the talk to help her customers achieve success. A favorite quote is “If you plant ice you’re going to harvest wind.

Vishakha Radia is the Managing Director of Customer Business Transformation (CBT) consulting team in Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group (CTG). Radia and her global team work with Business and IT Executives across multiple industries including Manufacturing, Retail, Service Provider, Healthcare, Government and Education and Financial Services. They move enterprise business and IT leaders through a customer transformation journey. CBT helps enterprise customers first visualize through powerful ‘use cases’ and then define transformational strategies and process change that deliver productivity improvements and cost reduction. CBT then implements pilots and quantifies the business value of collaboration technologies including mobile, social, video, and unified communications.
Formerly a consultant with Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), Radia advised senior executives in multiple automotive OEMs to adopt innovative business and technology solutions to transform customer experiences. She also holds a patent pending for an IP connected vehicle integrated interface.
Prior to Cisco, with over 15 years of IT and Business leadership experience in Fortune 10 manufacturing companies, Radia’s experience ranges from leading large scale IT strategy, portfolio management, IT applications development, architecture definition and delivery, merging global organizations, and inspiring change through visionary innovation and compelling communications. She has also held staff and line positions in manufacturing and executive roles in corporate strategy and planning.
Radia has been featured in Computerworld and Consulting magazines and has facilitated multiple CIO sessions in Michigan and with Gartner. She is VP of Partnership on the Michigan Council Women in Technology Managing Board, lives in Michigan and is married with two children.

Jan has designed a variety of communication solutions in different roles, such as development, technical sales, product management and now as VP Strategic Portfolio Management for UCC, communication platforms and endpoints at Siemens Enterprise Communications.
In addition to that he is Managing Director of Fastviewer GmbH, a company which Siemens Enterprise Communications has acquired in Dec 2010.

As Director of Product Line Management, Pat is responsible for the UNIVERGE 3C product line, the latest generation of Unified Communications software from NEC. Prior to NEC, Pat led the product management team at Sphere Communications, which was acquired by NEC. Sphere Communications was the developer of Sphericall a fully software based IP PBX and Unified communications product. Sphere Communications was awarded a patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office for the packet based PBX. Prior to Sphere Communications, Pat was responsible for managing a global portfolio of carrier class multi-media access gateways for Internet Access and VoIP at 3Com Corporation and US Robotics Corporation (acquired by 3Com). Before joining US Robotics, Pat held a variety of positions ranging from software development, technical sales engineering and product management at Ameritech Corporation where his expertise involved the blending of broadband networking technologies and networked software applications for automated workflow and decision support systems. Pat graduated from the University of Illinois – Chicago with a Bachelors of Science in Quantitative Methods and Information Decision Sciences. He lives in Chicago, Illinois with his wife Kim and their three children.

Melanie Turek is Vice President of Research at Frost & Sullivan. She is a renowned expert in unified communications, collaboration, social networking and content-management technologies in the enterprise. For 15 years, Ms. Turek has worked closely with hundreds of vendors and senior IT executives across a range of industries to track and capture the changes and growth in the fast-moving unified communications market. She also has in-depth experience with business-process engineering, project management, compliance, and productivity & performance enhancement, as well as a wide range of software technologies including messaging, ERP, CRM and contact center applications. Ms. Turek writes often on the business value and cultural challenges surrounding real-time communications, collaboration and Voice over IP, and she speaks frequently at leading customer and industry events, including VoiceCon, Interop and CMP Media's Enterprise 2.0 Conference, for which she serves as an advisory board member and track chair. Prior to working at Frost & Sullivan, Ms. Turek was a Senior Vice-President and Partner at Nemertes Research. She also spent 10 years in various senior editorial roles at Information Week magazine. Ms. Turek graduated cum laude with a BA in Anthropology from Harvard College. She currently works from her home office in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

Gary Mading is Senior Product Manager at Aastra USA, a leading provider of open-standards voice communications solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Gary manages the product strategy for Aastra USA’s IP-PBXs for enterprise customers. Gary has over 20 years of experience developing and marketing communication products, including carrier systems, transmission equipment, broadband access products and enterprise communication systems. Gary holds a B.S. Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Texas and an M.S. in Business Management from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Dr. Jack Jachner brings more than 20 years of telecommunications research and development experience to his current position at Alcatel-Lucent in business development for OpenTouch in North America. In his current role, Dr. Jachner is responsible for directions and partnerships to enable collaborative conversations via an award winning platform like OpenTouch.

Jack has served in a variety of positions in Alcatel then Alcatel-Lucent, including operational management in the Enterprise Communication Server business unit, in the Research and Innovation and in the CTO. Previously, Dr. Jachner has held positions at Tellabs, the Atlantic Aerospace Electronics Corporation (AAEC), and Bell Northern Research.

Jack holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, and a Master of Science degree in data networking and Doctor of Science degree in digital signal processing from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Jack is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and holds a number of patents in the area of communication applications.