Unified Communications: Interviews

Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors. Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CEO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

The quest to find a good price on a high-definition television can be a frustrating and confusing experience. For most people, the process concludes with the purchase of a brand-new TV set. For Mukesh Chatter, that was just the beginning.

Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, is well known for its consumer devices but maintains a range of enterprise products. Mary McDowell is executive vice president and general manager of Nokia's Enterprise Solutions, a division that deals with products from the E Series phones to security appliances to software such as the Intellisync Mobile Suite, designed to manage a fleet of enterprise devices. She spoke with Jeremy Kirk about Nokia's direction in several enterprise areas.

Cisco introduced its Services Oriented Network Architecture less than two years ago, and now the company says the SONA concept in action will reduce corporate costs and move customers toward virtualized services, including security, voice, mobility, applications, management, processing and storage -- with the network as the common facet. Bill Ruh, vice president of Advanced Services at Cisco, recently discussed with Network World Senior Editor Denise Dubie about why network engineers should be already be incorporating the principles of SONA into their network design and how Cisco's services-oriented architecture (SOA) would help them better architect and navigate tomorrow's next-generation networks. Can you give me a bit of background on SONA?

Can you trust the folks who recently brought you a 12-hour wireless e-mail outage to bring your cell phone to the corporate PBX?

Open source PBX maker Digium has appointed Danny Windham to be CEO of the company and announced that its founder, Mark Spencer, will become chairman of the board and CTO. The two men answered questions during a teleconference Tuesday about the future of the company, which markets the open source Asterisk IP PBX. Some of the questions and answers follow.

Verizon Business, an operating unit formed after Verizon Communications acquired MCI, marked its one-year anniversary on Jan.6. The U.S.-based operation expects total revenue to exceed US$20 billion for 2006, leading Verizon Business President John Killian to call it "a very good first year." In a recent interview with Computerworld, Killian talked about the past year, the competition and the future of his business unit.

When a former server/storage executive takes over a networking company, you can expect things to change. This process is happening at Extreme Networks, where Mark Canepa began working as CEO in August after a stint as the executive vice president of Sun's data management group. He spoke with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth about his plans for Extreme, how the company will compete with Cisco, and the convergence of data center technologies.

Peter Carbone, chief architect at Nortel for nearly three years and the company's chief technology officer since late November, talked with Computerworld about what he called the "invisible network," technology innovations that will bring about next-generation networks and how Nortel's customers see the company. A Nortel veteran of 28 years, Carbone also said that security is an ever present and growing concern for companies as they move more of their business operations to the network.