Speakers
As of
06/16/2011
Raman Abrol
Raman Abrol is vice president and head of worldwide BSS sales for Comverse. He and his team work with service providers to understand their business problems and find innovative solutions that enable faster time to market, intuitive business processes and simplicity in IT architecture. Abrol has more than 15 years of industry experience, having worked extensively with service providers in Asia, EMEA and the Americas. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from India’s University of Poona, a master’s degree in business administration from New York University-Stern School of Business and a master’s degree in engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology
Lara Albert
Lara Albert is senior director, global marketing at Globys. Leading Globys’ corporate and product marketing initiatives, Albert has been responsible for the launch of Globys’ customer experience solutions while focusing on building awareness of Globys among today’s leading communications service providers worldwide. Prior to Globys, Albert was responsible for product marketing and strategy for the Billing & Commerce group at VeriSign. She has also held brand management roles at America Online and Kraft Foods. Albert holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration in marketing from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree in business administration from Vanderbilt University.
Dan Baker
Dan Baker is Technology Research Institute's research director, principal market synthesizer and co-founder. Baker has authored dozens of multi-client and custom reports spanning BSS and OSS across technologies. He is a former market analyst at Venture Development Corp. He authored one of the first multi-client research reports on the Advanced Intelligent Network market. When TRI became part of Dittberner Associates in 2004, Baker ran Dittberner's OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase before taking the company back in 2008. Baker has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.
Monica Braden
Monica Braden is an industry leader in billing and customer care operations, with more than 20 years of experience at telecommunications carriers. As Associate Vice President, Business Operations, at Frontier Communications, she has overseen call center business operations and end user billing. A veteran of numerous successful M&A integrations at Frontier, she currently serves as integration leader for call center and back office support for the Verizon transaction.
John Breen
John Breen is assistant vice president of design engineering for AT&T’s equipment solutions engineering organization. He is a 28-year veteran of the communications industry, 15 of those years within the family of AT&T’s data companies. Most of his experience has been in managing the pre-sales engineering and consulting organization.
Brett Brock
Brett Brock is a senior design engineer at Cox Communications. His primary focus is on value-added voice service development. A networking and services guru with the heart and instincts of a back office problem solver, he provides architectural recommendations and guidance for Cox Digital Telephony and Cox Wireless. He also is actively investigating migration strategies for Cox Digital Telephony and new service delivery frameworks for Cox's converged services strategy and is active in the Cable Interest Group at the TM Forum.
Cynthia Brumfield
Cynthia Brumfield is director of research at the Utilities Telecom Council (UTC), where she oversees the organization’s research and business analysis efforts. She focuses intensively on projects related to the development of the Smart Grid, the next generation communications technology that will drive America’s energy efficiency, security and reliability. In addition to her ongoing research efforts, she serves as the main staff liaison to the Smart Networks Council, a separate organization that focuses on the advancement of the Smart Grid. Before joining UTC, Brumfield was president of Emerging Media Dynamics, an advisory services firm that consulted with cable, wireless, telco, technology and content companies.
Ross Caplan
Ross Caplan is a key member of Verizon Wireless’s M2M Group, where he is the manager, M2M Strategy for Modules and Solutions, responsible for developing and managing M2M strategy, module and solution development. He is a highly regarded M2M expert with vast experience in the machine-to-machine/connected device market working for three major U.S. carriers architecting M2M business strategy, partnerships, new solutions, module portfolios and channel initiatives. Prior to Verizon, Caplan worked at Nextel and Sprint in the development and growth of their M2M business units. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree from the University of Miami.
Victoria Cashion
Victoria Cashion is senior enterprise solutions architect, global customer success, CCM, for Pitney Bowes Business Insight. She has worked in the variable data publishing business for more than 20 years. She entered the transactional document publishing world in telecom in 1998 and worked specifically on variable messaging and defining the one-to-one statement through up-sell messaging and affinity programming. For the last 10 years, her work in engineering with Pitney Bowes (formerly Group 1 Software) has revolved around the one-to-one turned-transpromo arena. With the formation of Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Cashion joined the global technology office.
Frank Delfer
Frank Delfer is executive vice president of technology and CTO of DST Output. He leads the systems development and support group as well as engineering and manufacturing systems development and support, product development and e-solutions. Delfer has nearly 30 years of experience as a leader in data processing and engineering and related technical services. In 1987, he was the founding president and general manager of International Billing Services (IBS), which now comprises DST Output’s West operation center. Delfer also served as vice president and CIO, consumer services, for AT&T from 1997 to 2004.
Ivo Dongen
Ivo Dongen is the manager for IT applications at SETAR and leads a team of 20 IT professionals in realizing optimal IT support for provisioning, billing and managing customer relations using world-class vendors. Together with SETAR’s IT Infrastructure team, Dongen’s team has been instrumental in SETAR’s rapid response to market demands. Previously, Dongen worked for KPMG Consulting, primarily in the public sector of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. He also has experience in system integration in the local public sector and worked as manager and Latin America knowledge lead for the e-government team of the KPMG Consulting practice.
Chad Dunavant
As executive director of CSG Systems’s product strategy team, Chad Dunavant contributes to the pursuit of new areas of development for the company. Most recently, he has focused on the emergence of free-form content and its influence on the cable and satellite community as well as the impact these new business models introduce to the BSS/OSS infrastructure currently in place. Over the past 10 years, Dunavant has worked in various product management capacities where, most recently, he led strategy for the CSG customer care product portfolio specifically focused on call center and Web applications.
Jim Dunlap
Jim Dunlap is the president and general manager of Cycle30. He is responsible for strategic direction, operations and financial performance. Dunlap has 20 years of leadership experience in retail, consumer products, utility and telecom sectors. Prior to Cycle30, he held senior roles at GCI, Campbell Soup Company, Digitech and Nordstrom.
Derek Edwards
Derek Edwards is the CEO of Globys Inc. Previously, he was the president and CEO of CallVision Inc., a software company that developed customer self-service e-billing and online bill reporting and analysis applications for the global telecommunications market. Edwards and two other University of Washington alumni founded CallVision in 1996. In 2000, he secured venture financing and expanded CallVision's market share. He sold CallVision to VeriSign in 2006. At VeriSign, Edwards was vice president of the self-care and analytics business. In 2008, he formed Globys and led a management team buyout of the group back from VeriSign.
Tom Erskine
Tom Erskine is the director of communications and media industry solutions for Pegasystems. He is responsible for defining and executing Pegasystems’ go-to-market strategy for the communications and media vertical, including thought leadership, marketing programs and product strategy. Prior to Pegasystems, Erskine was vice president of market strategy for Convergys. He began his career in communications with BCGI, where he helped design and build its market-leading real-time billing solution. He holds several U.S. and international patents issued for innovations in the communications software industry.
Michele Gehl
Michele Gehl is the IT Director - Provisioning, Porting and Numbering Platforms at Sprint. She is a 20-year wireless industry and IT veteran with experience in areas including billing system implementations and conversions, release management, integrated testing, application development, strategic vendor management, data center operations, compliance and IT continuity planning and disaster recovery services. She currently has development, vendor management, operations and production support responsibility for Sprint’s wireless subscriber provisioning systems including over the air (OTA) technologies and the local number portability (LNP) She regularly participates in LNP industry working groups and forums.
Bernie Gracy
Bernie Gracy, vice president of strategy and new business development for Pitney Bowes’ MSM division, is responsible for developing organic and inorganic growth strategies for the company. Gracy joined Pitney Bowes in 1997 as the manager of software engineering in DMT and held several leadership positions in systems engineering and software development before being promoted to vice president, enterprise integration solutions in 2001 and then vice president and general manager of software and professional services for DMT in 2003. He assumed his current position in March 2007.
Alice Harris
Alice Harris is the director of billing services for Qwest. She has responsibility for the strategy and execution of new billing initiatives and infrastructure improvements along with management of certain critical line operations for Qwest billing. Harris has a team of more than 70 employees. She has worked at Qwest and its predecessors for 30 years with a brief stint at Level 3 Communications where she was the senior director of network processes and metrics, charged with aligning North American and European network deployment processes. Harris holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Denver.
Kaynam Hedayat
Kaynam Hedayat, chief technology officer and senior director of product management at EXFO Service Assurance, is responsible for defining and driving the strategic and technology direction of the firm, its various product management and product marketing initiatives and representing EXFO on relevant standards bodies. He joined the company in April of 2008 from the acquisition of Brix Networks Corp. where he served as CTO and vice president of product management. A 20+ year industry veteran, Hedayat is an acknowledged expert in the areas of voice and video over IP, IP performance management and service assurance for next-generation IP-based services.
Faye Henris
Faye joined TEOCO in March 2010 as general manager of account management and marketing. She is a recognized authority with particular expertise in access cost and regulation as well as telco expense management and network planning/optimization. Henris started at MCI where she held positions in finance, network services, network operations and regulatory. She left MCI to found TeleCon LLC and served as its president and managing partner until it sold in 2000.
Emerson Hewitt
Emerson Hewitt is currently the vice president, imagineering and product development, for LIME. He is responsible for exploring new opportunities and creating new solutions beyond what’s evident with today’s thinking in the telecom product area and evaluating new lines of business to ensure a robust pipeline of innovative ideas for LIME. Hewitt has worked in telecoms in numerous countries in a variety of areas including finance, commercial, billing, marketing, product management and development and customer sales support. This experience has given him an almost 360o view on the telecommunications business.
Laurence Heyndrickx
Laurence Heyndrickx is director of IT product development for Verizon, responsible for developing new products and services, including security solutions, cloud services, IT solutions, enterprise mobility and data services, for global enterprise customers. She has more than 17 years of experience in software and IT services, including working with Web-based applications, cloud computing technologies and business-to-business processes. Prior to Verizon, Heyndrickx was director of research and development at Cybertrust, which was acquired by Verizon in 2007.
Laurence has a master’s degrees from the University of Ghent and the University of Leuven in Belgium and a bachelor’s degree from the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management Schools.
Shannon Hladky
Shannon Hladky has served in the telecommunications, Internet, and media/entertainment industries for more than 10 years and is responsible for managing Synaptitude's support to its clients, including business development, quality assurance, delivery execution and customer satisfaction. He has extensive experience in developing process and technology solutions to improve the business operations, efficiency and profitability of Synaptitude’s clients. He is also responsible for Synaptitude’s business operations including growing and managing the P&L of its multi-million dollar consulting services organization. Prior to joining Synaptitude, Hladky worked for IBM's Business Consulting Services. He holds a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Virginia.
Mike Holleran
Mike Holleran is senior product manager for SaaS operations at Info Directions. He started with the company in 1999 and supervised critical customer care and billing operations and the company’s internal information technology needs before accepting his current position. Holleran serves as a tremendous resource for internal teams and clients alike. His knowledge of network operations and best practices for the operation of the CostGuard datacenter ensures the highest standards for SaaS operations. He was a driving force in establishing the processes that earned Info Directions its SAS 70, Type II report.
Paul Hughes
Paul Hughes is director of product marketing for Oracle’s Communications Global Business Unit. He is responsible for marketing activities pertaining to Oracle’s billing and revenue management solution set in the communications, media/entertainment and cloud/enterprise verticals. Prior to joining Oracle, Hughes worked as a research principal for the Telemanagement Forum and spent more than 10 years as vice president of enabling technologies research with the Yankee Group.
Joel Hurley
Joel Hurley is vice president, consulting services for Hitachi Consulting. Hurley leads the margin optimization practice for Hitachi’s Communications, Media and Entertainment Group. He has more than 15 years of experience working with some of the largest global communications firms on revenue assurance, profitable sustainability, regulatory assurance and business intelligence. Hurley has also worked for Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young.
Mike S. Irizarry
Mike S. Irizarry is executive vice president and CTO at U.S. Cellular. He oversees information systems and all technological operations including towers, network build-outs and network operations Irizarry has held executive positions with Verizon, Bell Atlantic Mobile, Paging Network, Inc., and Motorola. He earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cleveland Technical College, a master’s degree in information management, a master’s degree in business administration from the International School of Information Management and a doctorate in communications technology from Capella University's School of Business and Technology. He is also a graduate of the University of Chicago's executive management program.
Mark Jeary
Mark Jeary is vice president of access management, North America for Global Crossing. He leads a team responsible for carrier relations, bill verification, access optimization, access pricing and voice routing. Jeary has more than 10 years experience in the telecommunications industry, specifically in the area of access management. He received his bachelor’s degree in business administration from Marist College and a master’s degree in management from Nazareth College.
Robert Jones
As vice president of product marketing and business development for the Mobile Data Charging Business Unit within Acision, Robert Jones is responsible for both sales and marketing of Acision’s charging solutions. With more than 20 years of international experience in the telecoms media and technology (TMT) sector, Jones has had a number of leadership roles in technology startups and large technology companies like Nortel, Cable & Wireless and Cisco. Previous to joining Acision, he set up Bluefire Consultancy to provide commercial analysis, growth, and business strategy consulting to TMT sector companies.
Patrick Kelly
Patrick Kelly is research director for Analysys Mason's global telecoms software research stream, which focuses on identifying the rapidly growing segments in the telecoms software market and providing forecast and market share data on each of the 26 segments by region and service type. He has produced research on IP next-gen service assurance, the 3G mobile software market and customer experience management. Kelly is a frequent speaker at industry conferences. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont, and an MBA from Plymouth College.
Shree Kodavatiganti
Shree Kodavatiganti is principal consultant for the billing and customer care practice at Infosys. He is a process and technology specialist with 16 years of experience in delivering multi-million dollar global business transformations. Shree provides functional and architecture guidance to billing practice at Infosys. He worked for more than 10 years as a global consultant and four years as an R&D manager.
Scott Kolman
Scott Kolman is the head of marketing for Amdocs’ customer management division. As a recognized marketing professional specializing in CRM he is often asked to brief analysts, to comment and write articles in professional trade journals such as CRM Magazine and Billing & OSS World and Destination CRM. He has spoken at Billing & OSS World and the Gartner Group CRM Conferences.
Rafi Kretchmer
Rafi Kretchmer is director of product marketing at Amdocs. He is responsible for defining the business strategy and product direction for all of Amdocs’ revenue management products, including billing, mediation and partner settlement. He regularly writes whitepapers and articles, briefs industry analysts and speaks at major industry events. Kretchmer holds a master’s degree in law from the Bar-Ilan University and a bachelor’s degree in business management from the University of Derby.
Al Kurtze
Al Kurtze is the business development executive for telecom media networks at Capgemini. He has 45 years of industry experience in all areas of operations, marketing/sales and corporate development. He has been a senior operating officer with profit and loss responsibility for a large cellular operator, a large local exchange telephone operator and a large cable television multiple system operator. He has served on the boards of directors of publicly traded and privately held companies. Kurtze has substantial experience in corporate strategic planning, technology planning and implementation and operational execution. He has been involved in early deployments of technology such as digital switching, fiber optic transmission, cellular telephony and digital cellular.
Dr. Rakesh Kushwaha
Dr. Rakesh Kushwaha founded Mformation Technologies in 1999 and has served as their CTO since that time. He has devoted most of the last decade exclusively to device management issues and the advancement of management technologies for mobile and wireless environments. A device management pioneer, he has evolved with the industry as it has grown. He believes that the more than 700 billion objects that most analysts predict will be connected wirelessly by 2017 will all need to be managed. Prior to founding Mformation, he spent more than 10 years building leading-edge OSS to manage wireless, IP and telecommunication services.
Dave Labuda
Dave Labuda is founder, CEO and CTO of Matrixx Software. He is known for co-founding Portal Software in 1994, which he sold to Oracle in 2006. He served as CTO of Oracle's Communications Global Business Unit until February 2008 where he provided architectural vision. Labuda started his career at Sun Microsystems in the UNIX operating systems group. He also serves as a board member for Aria Systems. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University and has 11 patents issued with several more pending.
Mary Lane
Mary Lane is a director at Clearwire with 20 years as a leader of rapidly growing organizations. At Clearwire she spearheaded the launch of revenue assurance and directed the business intelligence program. At T-Mobile she led billing, roaming, rating and mediation and IT operations. As a consultant she’s integrated organizations and delivered mission critical technology.
Erik Larson
Erik Larson is the strategic director of social media and digital care for AT&T Business Solutions’ global customer service. His goal is to provide customers with options for how they would like to communicate with AT&T to receive pertinent information and perform business care transactions. AT&T global customer service is aggressively utilizing new media, or languages, to extend its reach and provide customers greater flexibility and choice. Larson previously supported AT&T network operations in Nashville, Tenn. His focus was on AT&T’s landline telecommunication product portfolio, where he oversaw customer satisfaction and product quality for installation and maintenance.
David Lee
David Lee is vice president of finance for BT Global Services, a world leader in delivering and managing converged telecom services for global customers. He has 25 years in the global and domestic telecom industry supporting all areas of finance. In his current role, Lee is CFO of CNS, a global trading hub that captures customer specific and shared network costs around the globe and allocates them to customer contracts.
Grant Lenahan
Grant Lenahan is executive director and strategist of service delivery in the chief strategy office at Telcordia. He leads the market direction and evolution of Telcordia’s service delivery suite, especially charging, policy, content and personalization for SDP, IMS and converged network environments. He focuses on networks that enable a broad value chain to deliver a wide range of highly personalized, relevant multimedia services. Lenahan is a columnist and author of numerous papers in the areas of IMS, NGN, convergent services and wireless services.
Shira Levine
Shira is directing analyst for Next Gen OSS and Policy at Infonetics Research and an expert in OSS, billing, and service delivery platforms. She authors market-size and forecast reports on policy servers, SDPs and subscriber data management and notes and surveys on the service delivery infrastructure, evolution of Telco 2.0 and new service models. Shira also was a Senior Analyst with IDC and a senior research analyst with Stratecast’s OSS Competitive Strategies practice. Levine holds a BA in Classics from Amherst College and an MSJ from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
Chris Lewis
As director of market development for Cognera, Chris Lewis brings an extensive knowledge of the deregulated utilities market as a strong understanding of customer data analytics. A seasoned utilities sales and marketing professional, he has held leadership positions with Enmax Energy and Direct Energy and was responsible for driving more than $2 billion over five years. Lewis believes that his previous experience playing professional football for the Calgary Stampeders in the CFL prepared him for the fast pace of the deregulated power and natural gas markets.
John McCawley
John McCawley, CEO of Verecloud Inc., co-founded the company and is its chief visionary and strategist. Prior to joining Verecloud, he was managing partner and president of Gathering Point Business Networks. Before that, he served as a principal and partner at consulting firm Parocon. McCawley has helped develop innovative solutions for a wide range of major communications companies including Level 3, Sprint PCS, Sprint Nextel, Mobile Satellite Ventures and EchoStar. He began his career as an analyst/engineer at Schwab Institutional and later was a senior engineer at Standard and Poor's Compustat.
Tim McElligott
Tim McElligott is editor-in-chief of Billing & OSS World magazine. He manages the editorial content of the magazine as well as the B/OSS Live! Conference & Businessplex. He has been a journalist for the telecommunications industry since 1999 when he joined
Telephony magazine as senior editor after a 14-year career in the telecom service provider sector with roles ranging from central office technician to wireless network engineer. McElligott has reported on and provided analysis for software, testing,
signaling and IP-based telephony. He also was editor of Independent, Telephony’s print supplement chronicling the rural telecom market.
Susan McNeice
Susan McNeice is vice president of software research with Yankee Group's Anywhere Network team, driving research in marketing, operations and OSS/BSS software including subscriber and policy management, customer care, self-service, charging, dynamic cataloging, business intelligence and analytics, revenue and service assurance. Before Yankee Group, she led the OSS/BSS group at Stratecast and was director of marketing at Vibrant Solutions (now TEOCO.) She led AT&T teams in OSS/BSS strategic planning, software definition and program management. McNeice holds a master’s degree in project management from the George Washington University School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Delaware.
Neil Metviner
As chief marketing officer at OSG Billing Services, Neil Metviner is responsible for leading the company’s organic growth initiatives and driving the marketing strategy. He is also tasked with product development, communications, account management and customer marketing. During his 30-year career, Metviner has effectively built and transformed organizations using his skills in strategy, operations and process improvement. His prior management experience includes serving as executive vice president of Pitney Bowes Inc., president of Pitney Bowes Direct and president, global mainstream for Pitney Bowes Europe. In 2002 Metviner was named the Direct Marketing Association’s B2B Marketer of the Year.
Sanjay Mewada
Sanjay Mewada is vice president of Strategy at NetCracker, responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the company and managing its partnership program. Prior to joining NetCracker, Mewada was vice president of the Telecom Software Strategies (TSS) Decision Service at Yankee Group. There he managed research and programs to improve communications service providers' business results. Before Yankee Group, Mewada worked at MCI, Intelsat and the World Bank in product management and technology evaluation functions. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in business administration from Bombay University, as well as a master’s degree in international business from the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Mike Morini
Mike Morini is president and CEO of Aria Systems. He is responsible for the company’s overall strategy and execution. Prior to joining Aria Systems, Morini served as head of global sales for SAP BusinessObjects where he ran a worldwide sales organization responsible for more than $1 billion dollars of revenue annually. He served as executive vice president of Worldwide Operations at OutlookSoft prior to it being acquired by SAP. Morini also held executive roles in sales and services at SS&C Technology, Advent Software, and JD Edwards. He holds a degree from Colgate University and began his professional career at IBM.
Mark Mortensen
Mark Mortensen is the lead analyst for Analysys Mason's Customer Care and Service Fulfillment research programs. He specializes in customer self-care, IT asset management, enterprise order control and master catalogues. Prior to Analysys Mason, Mortensen spent 20 years at Bell Laboratories and held positions with Granite Systems, Telcordia Technologies and VPIsystems. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in physics from Yale University and received two AT&T Architecture awards for innovative software solutions. In addition, he is an adjunct faculty member of UMass Lowell in the College of Management.
Eric Nelson
Eric Nelson, managing principal and chief development officer for Synaptitude Consulting, has more than 29 years of executive management, information technology and systems development experience. His career includes more than 14 years at the executive level, including five years of general management, P&L, and business development responsibilities. He currently provides enterprise and operations systems consulting, with offices in Washington, D.C., New York City and Seoul, Korea. Nelson has extensive experience in operations system architecture and implementation and revenue management (sold-to-cash, meter-to-cash) in both the telecommunications and the utilities industries. He received his bachelor’s degree from George Washington University.
Jeff Newman
Jeff Newman joined Enfora in June 2001 as vice president of business development and recently added the role of chief strategy officer. He is responsible for setting corporate strategy and identifying, developing and managing new business opportunities for Enfora's next-generation wireless products. Before joining Enfora, Newman was the general manager and senior director of Xircom/Omnipoint Technologies where he led next-generation wireless efforts, releasing some of the first wireless data products to the M2M market. Newman holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arizona and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Phoenix.
Kevin O’Brien
Kevin O’Brien is executive director and chief BSS architect for Comcast Cable, responsible for building the company’s enterprise service platform, including defining the architecture, budget, SOA policies and governance and building an organization of 15 application development teams contributing integrated deliverables on a monthly basis. The platform performs over 40 million transactions per day supporting ordering, billing, payments, provisioning, activation and service troubleshooting and assurance. He also re-architected the company’s call center desktop application to utilize the platform, and through the delivery of that application reduced order capture time significantly and accelerated the entire roll out to call centers.
Marie-Paule Odini
Marie-Paule Odini brings years of telecom experience including voice and data. After managing the HP worldwide VoIP program, HP wireless LAN program and HP Service Delivery program, she is now HP CMS CTO for EMEA. Since joining HP in 1987, Odini has held positions in technical consulting, sales development and marketing within different HP organizations in France and the U.S. All of her roles have focused on networking or the service provider business, either in solutions for the network infrastructure or for the operation. Odini holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Utah State University.
Roger Parks
Roger Parks is the vice president of business development and one of the co-founders of doxo. He is responsible for engaging enterprises to adopt a new way of connecting with their customers. Prior to doxo, Park was vice president of product and partnerships for Amdocs’ digital commerce division where he worked with service providers around the globe to enable new revenue streams through their networks.
Jo Ann Parris
Jo Ann Parris is vice president of relationship technology management for Convergys. She is responsible for solution, product, and channel marketing for the company’s RTM solutions which enable multichannel intelligent customer interactions. Parris also was vice president of program management for several North American communications clients for Convergys customer management. Previously, she held increasingly responsible positions at Verizon in care operations, marketing, and IT. Parris holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Stetson University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of South Florida.
John Payne
John Payne is CEO of Zumbox. He has a track record in the mailing industry, in consumer and small business Internet services, enterprise software, network and application security, SaaS and wireless. Payne is the former chairman and CEO of Stamps.com. He also served as CEO for Preventsys, a provider of network security and regulatory compliance; enterprise content management software provider Day Software; and two companies in the financial services regulatory compliance space: FMI and LoanStar.
Michele Pelino
Michele Pelino is a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Her research focuses on new opportunities in enterprise mobility and M2M technologies for vendors and service providers in the telecom and networking industries. Pelino identifies overall trends, adoption factors and the evolution of mobile device, solution and application usage among SMB and enterprise users. In addition, she helps vendors and service providers in the enterprise mobility and M2M ecosystem position their products and services to address the needs of companies that are adopting and deploying these solutions. Pelino has more than 15 years of experience in the telecommunications industry working as a consultant.
Arturo Pereyra
Arturo Pereyra leads marketing and business development for Oracle's media and telecom applications and solutions. Perevra has more than 15 years of experience in the technology, media and telecommunications industries. His experience also includes leading worldwide marketing activities for HP's Emerging Markets Group and co-founding a venture-backed wireless company. Pereyra was previously an associate with Booz Allen & Hamilton, working in the marketing and mult-media practice. He has spoken at numerous Industry conferences around the world.
Ed Pinnes
Ed Pinnes is executive director of service assurance strategic solutions at Telcordia Technologies. In this capacity, he provides consulting solutions that help service providers streamline their OSS strategies, improve operational results, and achieve the benefits of service management. From 2007 to 2008 Pinnes was the CTO of Elanti Systems, a start-up company specializing in the optimization of IP/MPLS networks. Prior to that, he was at Telcordia and Bell Labs. He is a member of the Technical Strategy Committee of the TeleManagement Forum and of the Industrial Advisory Board at the University of Virginia.
Adan Pope
Adan Pope, CTO and chief strategy officer for Telcordia, has worked at the forefront of industry innovation since the 1980s with AT&T Bell Labs. Previously, Pope was CTO (Americas) and vice president at Cramer responsible for its entry into the planning systems market and earned several patents leading the research organization. He also was CTO and vice president of engineering at Clear Communication and led strategic EMS development programs at Tellabs. Pope has contributed directly to the development and adoption of industry standards and holds a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and master’s degrees in business administration and computer science.
Monica Ricci
Monica Ricci is CSG Systems’ director of product marketing, focused on synergies and value propositions across all elements of CSG’s BSS portfolio. She has 20 years of experience in the communications industry, 15 of which have been working with BSS vendors delivering billing solutions and consulting with service provider customers to evolve their billing-related processes for wireline, wireless and next-generation services. With a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago, Ricci’s current focus is understanding the drivers for new telecommunications business models, incorporating both customers and the growing assortment of partners in the operator value chain.
Scott Rice
Scott Rice is vice president of customer and billing services for Sprint. He is the executive owner of consolidated managed services operations supporting the primary customer management environment. Rice oversees customer billing strategy and operations, including bill production outsourced to DST Output. He has been with Sprint (previously Nextel) for more than nine years and in the telecommunications industry since 1983. Rice is a member of the CIO Forum and the Amdocs Technology Advisory Council.
Robert H. Riordan
Robert H. Riordan is executive vice president and director of corporate development for Nsight. He is a dynamic speaker on emerging technologies in telecommunications whose job has him looking six months to six years ahead to identify trends in the market. When not working on mergers, acquiring new markets and spectrum or interfacing with investment bankers, Riordan researches potential technologies and their role at Nsight. Through Riordan’s studies of Mobile IP, for example, Nsight became the first company in the U.S. to provide the service.
Carey Roesel
Carey Roesel is vice president and consultant with Technologies Management Inc. Roesel joined TMI in 1996 and works with a wide variety of telecommunications carriers to obtain certification and manage ongoing regulatory issues. He provides in-depth analysis regarding key local telecommunications issues, including UNE-P and switched access. Prior to TMI, Roesel was manager of business planning at Sprint/United. From 1993 to 1995, he was responsible for interpreting and maintaining the company's access, toll and private line tariffs. Roesel earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Central Florida.
Valerie Scheder
Valerie Scheder is executive director supporting AT&T business solutions - global customer service. She is responsible for social media and digital care solutions for AT&T’s global enterprise, small business and wholesale customers. In addition, her team leads internal social media efforts. Scheder previously supported AT&T enterprise mobility customer care, global business collections and international customer service. She has served in various business-focused functions such as sales, customer service, product management, service assurance and operational development. Scheder began her AT&T career as a college hire in their Leadership Program.
Susannah Scholl
Susannah Scholl is the director of IT business operations at General Communication Inc (GCI), an Alaska-based integrated communications provider. She is currently responsible for security, compliance, portfolio and financial management and has more than 20 years of combined utility experience affording a thorough understanding of the electric, gas and telecommunications industries. Scholl’s technology experience spans more than 14 years and includes the development and implementation of a large-scale customer information system, in addition to multiple billing system conversions. She holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Washington.
Tara Seals
Tara Seals is editor of B/OSS magazine and editor-in-chief of vision2mobile. She has more than 11 years of experience reporting on service provider issues for VIRGO, including in-depth experience covering the back office and OSS for a good portion of that time. She also is a speaker at industry events and was recently a judge for the GSMA Award for best OSS implementation, given out at Mobile World Congress. Seals holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York and attended the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.
Shai Shamir
Shai Shamir has more than 10 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, working both as a consultant and in-house with service providers and software vendors. In his current role at Amdocs, Shamir leads the marketing activities for business process management, social media and customer experience management. Other responsibilities include defining and aligning corporate strategy, positioning, generating market awareness and briefing analysts. In addition, Shamir has been leading TM Forum’s Managing Customer Experience group for the last two years, contributes to TM Forum Insight reports on both the customer experience and social media and regularly blogs about the customer experience.
David Sharpley
David Sharpley is senior vice president of marketing and product management at Bridgewater Systems. He is responsible for driving global marketing, product management and business development activities. Before joining Bridgewater in 2008, Sharpley was responsible for Oracle’s global marketing communications and alliance partnerships. Prior to Oracle, he was the executive vice president of marketing and product management for MetaSolv Software and led the product and engineering units of Nortel’s OSS and Clarify’s CRM business units. Sharpley holds a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Carleton University and an master’s degree in international business administration from the University of Ottawa.
Juliet Shavit
Juliet Shavit is the founder and president of SmartMark Communications, an award winning strategic communications firm and winner of the 2010 International Business Award for “Best Public Relations” Agency. After more than a decade of serving the utilities industry, Shavit launched SmartEnergy IP, a consulting practice within SmartMark Communications, focused on customer education around smart grid. Today she acts as a strategic advisor to utilities globally, helping them develop effective programs and messaging at different stages of smart grid deployment. During her expansive career, Shavit has helped companies of all sizes develop innovative external communications strategies.
Wai Shum
Wai Shum is the director of business line management for the monetization portfolio at Redknee. He is responsible for the product direction for Redknee’s real-time rating, charging and policy management solutions currently deployed in major customers such as Vodafone, O2, MTS, and Zain. Wai has more than 10 years of technical and management experience in creating, implementing and marketing telecommunications solutions for mobile network operators. He has experience in both the business and technical aspects of OSS/BSS infrastructure, working closely with operators to deploy real-time charging, billing, and policy management solutions, as well as handset client development, most recently in the area of social networking.
Kerry Sims
Kerry Sims is director of communications and media and entertainment for Hitachi Consulting. Sims has more than 15 years of management and technology experience and has worked with some of the largest and most influential telecommunications service providers on business strategy/transformation, revenue assurance, process improvement and technology planning. Sims has also worked at US WEST’s advanced technology laboratory and with Arthur Andersen.
Ardeth Smith
Ardeth Smith is vice preisdent of client delivery and strategies at ProCom Consulting. He leads complex, high-risk systems initiatives for telcos, specializing in merger and acquisition-led customer system consolidation. Smith was the IS program manager for Frontier’s successful conversion of the Verizon West Virginia properties (617,000 access lines). He has previously worked for CGI-AMS, BearingPoint, Coopers and Lybrand’s consulting division and the EDS CIS system implementation group.
Jim Steele
Jim Steele is director of business development at TeleSphere Software. He joined TeleSphere in 2001 and was the primary architect of TeleSphere’s Advantage CABS wholesale billing program. Steele has been instrumental as a consultant and technical analyst for companies that partner with TeleSphere. He provides the critical link between the needs of the client, the industry and the sales, development and implementation teams. Steele earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Montana State University.
Mark Sten
Mark Sten is co-founder and senior vice president of global marketing and carrier relations for Globys, a leading provider of customer experience solutions for the worldwide telecommunications market. Prior to joining Globys, Sten served as vice president of strategy, product marketing and sales for VeriSign, which Globys spun off from in 2008. He also served CallVision as vice president of sales and business development. Sten’s previous roles include co-founder of Altus Alliance, president of Light Green Co. and co-founding The Hartman Group, which was acquired by global advertising agency DDB.
Harold Teets
Harold W. Teets is senior vice president of information and network technologies for tw telecom. He oversees the company's IT, network technology and technology operations groups, which include systems development and operations, billing management, revenue assurance, network management systems development and network management systems. Previously he was CTO at Xspedius Communications and has held executive technology leadership roles with AT&T Canada, MCI, Brooks Fiber, Conversent Communications, Looking Glass Networks and MFS. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from LaSalle University.
Fredel Thomas
As director of product management for CHR, Fredel Thomas oversees product planning, marketing and P&L for the company’s managed services. She joined Martin Group (later merged with CHR Solutions) in 2000 and served in product development, quality assurance, sales and project management roles. Thomas brings more than a decade of communications industry knowledge and expertise with special emphasis on converging technologies and process management. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of South Dakota.
Paul Treasure
Paul Treasure is vice president of information systems at Frontier. His company’s main business is support systems, which include customer care, retail billing, carrier access billing, trouble ticketing and inventory and provisioning. Treasure is one of Telecom’s most seasoned experts at acquisition integration and delivering business synergies
John Trembley
John Trembley is the director of product marketing at Netformx. He is responsible for strategic marketing and contributes industry knowledge and customer requirements to define the company’s product road map. With more than 16 years of telecommunications industry experience, Trembley has held management positions at Xeround, Oracle and TimesTen. His previous work experience also includes roles at NewTERA, GST Telecom, Electric Lightwave and Atlas Telecom.
Paolo Trevisan
Paolo Trevisan is chief marketing office at Accanto Systems. He has more than 20 years in marketing and product management for test and measurement and assurance. He once led the product management efforts for Agilent’s LTE Assurance product. Previously, he held marketing and business development positions at Tektronix, including EMEA/Asia regional marketing management for communications business and product management. Trevisan holds a master’s degree in electronic engineering from the University of Padova in Italy.
Eric Troup
Eric Troup serves as chief technology officer of worldwide communications and media industries at Microsoft, focusing on technology management and industry solutions strategy. He acts as the technical leader for the communications and media industry organization, guiding the evolution of products and industry solutions in consultation with customers, product groups, account teams, partners and industry organizations. Troup is responsible for evolving the technical strategy for a growing global ecosystem of BSS, OSS and cloud service delivery management solutions, leveraging Microsoft platforms and tools.
Tony Velcich
Tony Velcich is director of product management at Oracle Corp. where he is currently responsible for Oracle’s overall communications industry analytics strategy. In this role he manages a team that drives data warehouse (DW) and business intelligence (BI) requirements for the Oracle Communications Data Model (OCDM) and surrounding DW/BI solutions. Prior to Oracle, Velcich held director and senior management and marketing positions at Portal, TimesTen and Informix Software.
Florence Weber
Within HP Communications & Media Solutions, Florence Weber is a senior OSS solution manager, leading the HP customer service assurance solution. She has more than 25 years of experience in software for the telecom industry. Weber started her career at IBM, joined the intelligent networks domain of Digital in 1987 and spent another 20 years in the OSS domain, part of HP since 2002. She held various positions in software development, consulting, partner management, business development and solution management, and is a frequent speaker at OSS industry and HP events. A graduate of Nice Science University, Weber holds a master’s degree in software engineering.
Mark Wyman
Mark Wyman is the vice president of Operations Support Systems (OSS) for Time Warner Cable. He is responsible for OSS systems that support TWC’s residential and business networks and services, including fault, performance, inventory, testing, reporting, ticketing, mapping, and trouble management, among other OSS tools. Mark has worked in the cable, telecommunications, and technology industries for more than 20 years. Prior to Time Warner Cable, Mark was an Operations Support Systems product management and business development executive at Telcordia Technologies and at Ai Metrix. Mark was also an OSS and technology leader at Comcast, managing engineering and systems development, in particular working on the architecture of the next generation voice and data services, technology, and operations needs. Mark began his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he was an OSS systems engineer and manager of advanced network and performance management systems. Mr. Wyman holds a Masters of Science in Engineering Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Syracuse University.
