« March 2007 | Main | May 2007 »
April 25, 2007
Jon Arnold / Mario Belanger - Avaya Canada and Enterprise Communications
On this week's podcast, Jon spoke with Mario Belanger, President of Avaya Canada. Mario and Jon discussed the current trends around the adoption of IP communications among Canada's enterprises. These included Unified Communications, the challenges vendors face in developing effective channels to support IP, and the potential IP brings as a business transformation enabler. Avaya's acquisition of Ubiquity was also discussed in the context of a successful Canadian vendor, and what they bring to Avaya's IP communications portfolio.
Mario Belanger, President of Canadian Operations, Avaya Canada
Mario Belanger is Avaya’s president of Canadian operations. He is responsible for directing Avaya Canada’s sales and operations, and providing strategic direction to expand the company’s leadership and market share in Canada. Avaya is a leading global provider of communications networks and services for businesses with Canadian headquarters in Markham, Ontario, and offices across the country.
Most recently, Mario was president of Paradyne Worldwide Corporation where he was responsible for sales, marketing, customer service and research and development. Prior to that, he was vice president and general manager of AT&T Paradyne Canada where he was responsible for Canadian sales and marketing activities. Before joining Paradyne in 1986, Mr. Belanger held management positions at Xerox Canada and Bell Canada.
Mario is a graduate of Bishop’s University. He has received numerous sales excellence and leadership awards over the course of his career. A native of Montreal, Quebec, he currently resides with his family in Markham, Ontario.
Posted at 12:36 PM • Comments (0)
April 17, 2007
Jon Arnold / Craig Betts - Solace Systems and Intelligent Content Routing
On this week's podcast, Jon spoke with Craig Betts of Ottawa-based Solace Systems. Craig is the founder, as well as CEO and President, and his company has a leading focus on an emerging network solution - intelligent content routing. Craig framed the discussion by explaining what this term means, and why it's becoming important - not just for service providers, but for enterprises as well as companies that are in the business of regularly pushing content out to communities of interest.
Good examples would be a news service like Reuters, or a financial information service like Bloomberg. Their subscribers depend on timely, accurate and relevant content on a continual basis. Craig talked about the challenges of doing this in existing networks and how solutions like his can not only deliver content more efficiently, but can also enable the creation of new content streams, and hence new revenue sources. For now, the focus is mainly on data content, but multimedia is coming, which will only increase the need for intelligent content routing.
Craig Betts - President and CEO, Solace Systems
Mr. Betts founded Solace Systems with the vision of embedding application intelligence directly into networks. Specifically, Mr. Betts observed that hardening content infrastructure into lightning fast hardware would enable data and content service providers to offer highly scalable new revenue generating services and improve distributed communications for large enterprises. Mr. Betts works closely with all aspects of the business and maintains strategic relationships with customer executives to assure successful product deployments.
Prior to Solace Systems, Mr. Betts was CEO of Waterfall Networks, a developer of Web conferencing equipment, Vice President, Technology at In-Touch Survey Systems and a Project Executive at IMRglobal (acquired by CGI Group). Mr. Betts holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Queen's University.
Posted at 10:43 AM • Comments (0)
April 13, 2007
Jon Arnold / Kate Morgan - Podcasting as a Business Tool
On this week's Canadian IP Thought Leaders podcast, Jon spoke with Kate Morgan. Kate is the President of Podwise Social Media, a Toronto-based firm focused on the business value of new media tools such as podcasting and blogging. Her company is a strong advocate of using these tools to help clients create a more personal touch for their business, especially in professions such as law.
Kate talked about the stong demand she is seeing from businesses who are just discovering social media tools, and want to use them in a beneficial way. Most of these companies are not technically savvy, and need help in creating these tools, as well as the content. Kate commented about the novelty effect of podcasts and blogs, as they are still very new to most businesses.
She emphasized the importance of producing quality content, and gave examples of how a law firm would use podcasts to explain basic legal principles. While one could get the same information in text form off a website, she noted that a podcast provides a more humanized feel, which professions like law don't easily give off. Finally, Kate distinguished between educational content and providing advice - the latter which she would not advocate for her clients to do.
Kate Morgan, President of Podwise Social Media Inc.
Kate Morgan founded Podwise Social Media Inc. in 2006. Podwise is a Toronto based marketing firm which specializes in educating professionals on the power and potential of social media tools to improve communication between the corporate and public spheres. Podwise faciliates the creation, management and integration of engaging blogs and podcasts into more traditional marketing and public relations strategies.
Kate has always been passionate about technology and media, specifically the impact of the Internet on business communication, as more aspects of our personal and professional lives move online. Her previous experience as Marketing Director at Hull & Hull LLP, and her degree in English from Queen’s University, have been essential to her expertise in new media marketing strategies.
Posted at 04:07 PM • Comments (0)
April 05, 2007
Quality Concerns: Loki Jorgenson, Apparent Networks, with Bob Emmerson
Loki Jorgenson, Chief Scientist for Apparent Networks, responds to the opening question: What is Quality of Application? In light of the industry's current emphasis on QoE or Quality of Experience, Loki points out that QoA logically sits between QoS, the network performance, and QoE, the end-user experience. He goes on to relate how the 3 Qs of performance map directly onto the OSI Layer model and then illustrates how VoIP has essentially sidestepped the need to address QoA ... so far.
Loki then goes on to comment on the difference between "functional" and "dysfunctional" models of network performance. He points out that QoS has generally assumed that networks are functional - meaning that they are simply experiencing resource issues (like lack of bandwidth). Then resource management like QoS is a viable solution. The prevalence of degradation sources in most IP networks mean that operators need to think differently to resolve issues with performance - they are not resolved by QoS like in the case of congestion.
The conversation then turns to how the industry will evolve to meet the current challenges and whether a particular solution is likely to win out. Referencing the three layers of Quality again, Loki suggests that each one requires its own attention and thus its own solution. With an emphasis on "coupling" between the layers, it would seem inevitable that technologies and solutions will have to become integrated and flexible. Each customer will have such distinct needs that no one solution or vendor is likely to win through alone. In that vein, the nature of video is presented and how it will continue to raise the bar for the whole market. Voice was a relatively simple application in comparison to video. In fact, it is hard to listen to any two conversations about video on the network and imagine that they are talking about the same technology - is it High-Definition at home? Is it YouTube on the cell phone? Is it a tele-conferencing solution for SMBs?
Loki Jorgenson, Chief Scientist, Apparent Networks
Loki Jorgenson is the Chief Scientist at Apparent Networks and responsible for research, technology futures, intellectual property and overall thought leadership. As a Ph.D. physicist (McGill University) specialized in statistical mechanics and computational physics, Loki has been involved in a diverse range of network-based research since the early 1990s including high performance computing and grid networks, collaborative and distance learning, distributed interactivity, scientific visualization and algorithms development.
Today, Loki is a regular contributor at academic and network industry conferences, often speaking on expert panels and at workshops. As well, his views are regularly published as an industry columnist at searchNetworking and in various magazines. In addition, Loki authors many of the whitepapers offered by Apparent Networks.
Having joined the company in the early stages of its inception, Loki has directed the focus on expert systems, application modeling, network diagnostics, and packet behavioral analysis. The results have informed critical product developments at Apparent Networks in VoIP, video, high performance applications, wireless, automated network management and autognostics.
(To hear other podcasts in Bob Emmerson's Quality Concerns series click here.)
Posted at 04:26 PM • Comments (0)
