Eric Burger - SIP Forum Chairman - BEA Systems Inc

Eric is Deputy Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of the Communications Products Division at BEA Systems, primarily focusing on real-time multimedia communications and the telecommunications industry vertical.

Eric has made numerous contributions on protocols to the IETF (SIP, SIPPING, SIMPLE, LEMONADE, SPEECHSC, VPIM) and markup to the W3C (VoiceXML, CCXML, and MSCML). He is the inventor of the Applications and Services Infrastructure concept, bringing the web development paradigm to telephony applications. Service providers, application developers, and equipment manufacturers have since adopted SIP+XML as one of the motivations to moving to a SIP-based real-time communications infrastructure.

Prior to BEA Systems, Eric was a Founder and CTO at SnowShore Networks; CTO at Brooktrout Technology; and CTO of Cantata Technology. He has held various positions with ADC/Centigram, The Telephone Connection, MCI, Cable & Wireless, Texas Instruments, and Valid Logic Systems.

Eric holds SBEE, MBA, and Ph.D. Computer Science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Catholic University of Leuven, and Illinois Institute of Technology. He was a Lecturer at George Washington University and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University.

Mark Enstrom - Broadsoft

Mark Enstrom is a telecommunications professional with almost 14 years of experience in the industry, including roles in Systems Engineering, Product Line Management and Product/Field Marketing. In these roles, Mark has been instrumental in many product introductions. As a member of the Field Marketing team at BroadSoft, he works with service providers on their go-to-market efforts for Hosted PBX, Business Trunking and SIP trunking solutions. Before joining the Marketing team, he led the effort to define and document the SIP trunking solution, which is now BroadSoft’s fastest growing application. As BroadSoft’s representative to the SIP Forum, Mark was active with the SIPconnect Certification Committee and helped launch the SIPconnect Compliance Trademark. Prior to BroadSoft, Mark was with TTC/Acterna (now JDSU) and sentitO Networks (now Verso). Mark holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an MBA from the R. H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.

Chris Gatch - Cbeyond

Chris Gatch is the CTO and a founder of Cbeyond (NASDAQ: CBEY), a successful managed services provider started in 1999 and now publicly traded on the NASDAQ. Chris is responsible for Cbeyond's Engineering department as well as on-going network technology research and development. Chris has a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from Clemson University and a master's degree in the management of technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has served on the board of the Cisco BTS 10200 Users Group and the Service Provider Board of the International Packet Communications Consortium (IPCC). Chris has been professionally committed to VoIP technology since 1998.

Chris helped lead the formation of the SIP Forum’s Service Provider to IP PBX Interoperability Task Group for which he submitted the proposal to create. This task group produced the SIPconnect SIP Forum recommendation of which Chris was an editor along with Chris Sibley.

Steve Johnson - Ingate Systems

As President of Ingate Systems Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Ingate Systems A.B., Steven Johnson is responsible for building market recognition and developing multiple sales channels for Ingate products within the United States. Johnson most recently served as CEO of Abrena, Inc., a business development consulting firm that assists European and North American firms to expand in the United States. Prior to that, Johnson was President and CEO of Transcept, Inc., a telecommunications infrastructure company that develops products to economically enhance wireless network coverage and capacity. Johnson also served as Division General Manager for Lockheed Martin, and held a number of senior management positions at Lockheed Martin, Lockheed Corporation and Sanders Associates, Inc. Johnson was also Treasurer at Telco Systems, Inc., a supplier of Information and Communication Technology equipment for the Regional Bell Operating Companies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in economics and a Master’s in Business Administration from Boston University.

David Oran - Cisco Systems

David Oran is a Fellow at Cisco Systems, responsible primarily for the architecture and overall design of Cisco's VoIP products. He also consults on a variety of other areas at Cisco, including backbone network design, routing protocols, and quality of service methods.

Prior to joining Cisco Mr. Oran was a Senior Consulting engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, where he was Technical Director for the Mobile Software Business.

Mr. Oran's main interests lie in the area of the design and implementation of distributed algorithms for computer networks. He was a member of the DECnet architecture group and contributed to the design of key elements of DECnet through 3 iterations of its evolution. He was the designer of the DNA Naming Service, a highly advanced distributed directory system which was adopted by the Open Software Foundation as the local directory component of its comprehensive Distributed Computing Environment product set. Mr. Oran holds a number of patents and patents pending for his work on distributed algorithms and packet telephony systems.

Richard Shockey - NeuStar, Inc.

Richard Shockey is a Director and Member of the Technical Staff for NeuStar, Inc. [www.neustar.biz] based in Suburban Washington DC. NeuStar provides a number of critical services to the communications industry including the administration of all telephone numbers in North America, management of the wireline and wireless Number Portability Administration, number pooling and OSS products for carriers. NeuStar also operates the .BIZ. Internet Top Level Domain and manages the United States Country Code domain .US for the U.S. Dept of Commerce.

Mr. Shockey is a founder and has been Co-Chair of the IETF ENUM Work Group for many years and is an author of several IETF RFC's and numerous articles on Next Generation Network technologies for various publications. Mr. Shockey has lost count of how many times he has given a speech on ENUM. Educated at Washington University in St. Louis. Mr. Shockey and his wife live in Reston, Virginia.

Anwar Siddiqui - Avaya

Anwar Siddiqui is responsible for Avaya's Strategic technology direction and actively influences the company's investment priorities in areas such as Voice over IP, Instant Messaging, Video, Conferencing and Web Collaboration, Call Center capabilities, etc.

Anwar has 8+ years of executive management, product and portfolio management, software engineering, marketing, and business development in his current role at Avaya as well as at Lucent Technologies. He joined Lucent Technologies - Bell Laboratories in 1998 and conducted research on the first generation of Voice over IP call systems.

Anwar holds a Masters degreee from Columbia University in the City of New York in Electrical Engineering, and a Bachelor degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay. He holds numerous patents in the field of computer communication, network security and privacy, and QoS. He is an active contributor to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and is author of various IETF standard specifications.

Robert Sparks - Tekelec

Robert Sparks is a Principal Engineer at Tekelec. Before joining Tekelec, he was the VP of Research and Development at Estacado Systems, CTO at Xten Networks (now CounterPath) and has held management and research positions at Dynamicsoft, Lucent, MCI, and Texas A&M University. For over 8 years, Robert has focused on designing and developing SIP-based IP communications systems.

Robert is a co-author of the core SIP specification, RFC3261, and several of its updates and extensions. He chairs the IETF's SIMPLE and GEOPRIV working groups. Robert has focused on improving the level of interoperability of SIP implementations by coordinating the SIPIt and SIMPLEt interoperability events. Robert is also an active contributor to the reSIProcate project.

Robert has a BSc in Computer Science and a MSc in Mathematics from Texas A & M University.