Mark Straton
Cisco

Mr. Straton is Senior Director, Calling and Contact Center Marketing at Cisco, coming from the BroadSoft cloud UCaaS acquisition where he served as Vice President, Corporate and Product Marketing. Previously, he was Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing at energy management IoT start-up GridPoint, and Senior Vice President, Global Marketing for $4 billion Siemens communications divisions. Mr. Straton holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

Jamshid Rezaei
Mitel

Patrick Flanagan
NORSTAR Networks

Pat Flanagan is a Senior Partner at NORSTAR Networks.  A Solutions Architect, Pat has designed and implemented over 4000 client solutions over the last 25 years. He holds architectural and engineering certifications from industry technology leaders with specializations in Unified Communications, UCaaS, Global SD Wan deployments and Data Center.

Cyrus Nooriala
Cywest Communications

Cyrus Nooriala has served from July, 1998 to present as President and CEO of Cywest Communications, Inc. Prior to Cywest, Mr. Nooriala founded various companies providing bleeding-edge technologies to meet the demand for faster and more cost-effective means of communication. He has held various positions from software design in early virtualization technologies, to bridging the gap between mainframe systems and the Internet. Mr. Nooriala attended the University of California, Irvine as a Mathematics Major, and California State University, Fullerton where he double-majored in Computer Science and Business Marketing. During this time, Mr. Nooriala began his entrepreneurial endeavors and has remained as a solid influence in the industry ever since.

Frank Tersigni
Altivon

Frank Tersigni has spent over 30 years working in the telecommunications industry for companies small (Altivon, VoiceGenie, NDS, CallPro) and large (IBM, Genesys).   Primarily engaged in Sales and Marketing executive roles, he has worked with the consulting community for his entire career.

Kevin Butler
Vertical Communications

Kevin Butler, VP of Marketing of Vertical Communications, brings 20+ years of experience to the Vertical team. Kevin joined Vertical in 2010 and has held a variety of roles at Vertical, including Sales Engineer, Manager of Sales Engineering, Director of Product Management, Vice President of Vertical Market Solutions, and Vice-President of Marketing

Gary Czubak
Fortium Partners

Gary Czubak is a partner in the Chicago practice of Fortium Partners. He is a senior telecommunication executive with a broad CIO/CTO and General Manager background with  more than 40 years of technology leadership experience in the telecommunications, transportation, retail, real estate, government, financial, manufacturing, and professional service industries with startup to Fortune 50 organizations. His innovative telecommunications P&L improvement solutions  have been applied successfully  in enterprise, govt. public and private industry.

Greg Pittman
Pittman & Associates, Inc.

Jitender Singh
Conduit Global

Jitender Singh is SVP of Cloud Solutions, is responsible for driving the organic growth of Conduit Global's cloud solutions business. Jitender oversees sales and marketing, providing strategic direction to the technology solutions division. Prior to this, he was the Director and General Manager, Cloud Solutions, at Avaya, where he founded and spearheaded the growth of Avaya's cloud solutions business. Jitender has also held sales leadership and general management roles at Nokia and Ericsson, helping each company achieve leadership in the media and entertainment sector.

Cheryl O'Brien
Founder & President
Technology Management Corporation

Cheryl has been in the industry for over 38 years, seeing all major changes in communications technology. I have helped thousands of clients over the past 38 years. I am the President of an IT Consulting Firm, Technology Management Corporation, with 31 years in business.

Telecommunications Evolution
The long-distance landline network method of delivery, has begun to shut down, starting with Sprint. VoIP and Ethernet have taken over. Carriers are no longer accepting new customers for legacy services. Next, the carriers will shut down the service completely. The time to migrate to the new method is NOW.

Dan Aylward
Abilita

Dan Aylward specializes in nonprofit and municipality verticals, TEM and phone system RFP replacement. Mr. Aylward is on the Board of Directors and head of Marketing for Abilita. He has certifications from Avaya/Lucent and AOTMP. He has also been a guest author for nojitter.com