AstriCon 2018: Full Schedule

AstriCon is celebrating its 15th year in Orlando! As the longest-running event devoted to all-things Asterisk, AstriCon celebrates one of the most influential open source telecommunication projects in history and also its future impact on the communications industry.

10:00am EDT

Battling Robocallers - a Tutorial on STIR/SHAKEN

One of the most common complaints to the FCC are the result of automated dialers with pre-recorded messages (ie: Robocallers) A favorite trick to increase response rates of Robocallers is “neighbor spoofing”, replacing the caller-ID number with one similar to the called number. Often part of an attempt to defraud consumers, neighbor spoofing has earned the attention of the FCC and CRTC with new proposed regulations. By attending this session, participants will learn about a STIR/SHAKEN, mechanisms to verify caller-ID and detect whether it has been modified or substituted.

Speakers

Alan Percy

Senior Director of Product Marketing, TelcoBridges

Alan is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at TelcoBridges, with responsibility for the global marketing efforts for FreeSBC, the innovative software-based Session Border Controller from TelcoBridges. Offered as a no-cost download, FreeSBC and the optional paid services and... Read More →

Tuesday October 9, 2018 10:00am - 10:40am EDT
Kissimmee

Business

10:40am EDT

ITSPs in the Cloud: Changing Winds

By now, a critical mass of ITSPs (Internet telephony service providers) has stampeded into the Cloud. However, effective use of the cloud requires understanding the pitfalls and limitations of that type of infrastructure; for the most part, it was not designed for real-time communications needs, but for the larger "web economy". This presentation will outline some of the pluses and minuses of using mainstream cloud services to deliver VoIP applications, hosted PBX and SIP trunking service, and illuminate some important strategic considerations and KPIs which can have a big impact on cost structure and availability.

Speakers

Alex Balashov

VoIP platform developer, Kamailio

I am the founder of Evariste Systems, an Atlanta-based software company, home of CSRP (www.csrpswitch.com), a Kamailio-based Class 4 routing and SIP trunking delivery solution for ITSPs and CLECs.Since 2006, I have been, variously, an entrepreneur, an open source-oriented VoIP software... Read More →

Tuesday October 9, 2018 10:40am - 11:15am EDT
Kissimmee

Business

11:15am EDT

Tune Up Your Contact Center

We will explore several hot contact center enhancements, including callback in queue, ASR/TTS and SMS that can be built easily onto an existing Asterisk-based contact center. Whether FreePBX, raw Asterisk, or Digium Switchvox, we'll navigate options and learn how to build some of these features!

Speakers

Corey McFadden

President, Voneto

Corey McFadden is the founder and President of Voneto LLC, a communication solutions firm that ranks among the top national IP telephony integrators. She brings over 20 years of industry experience to Voneto with a unique background that includes experience in call center operations... Read More →

Tuesday October 9, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

1:45pm EDT

GDPR (Global Dial Plan Rules) for Enterprise Size Companies

How should we implement a Dial plan for a large Enterprise that its size spans beyond the borders of a country? There are several challenges that need to be addressed such as the number of sites/remote branches, number of deployed devices/users, how to display E.164 DID on inbound and outbound calls, how to handle calling party on globalize egress and localize ingress, what numbering plan to adopt for each specific country, what schema/algorithm to use to route between multiple SIP and PSTN gateways, and many more. The solution for each company can slightly vary based on very specific requirement for that company, however, from architectural point of view they share more less a similar solution based on the available technologies. In this session, we investigate how to address all these issues.

Speakers

Ahmad Sharifinejad

Longtime Asterisk developer/consultant for European countries. Ph.D. graduate from the University of New South Wales in Electrical Engineering and computer science in the field of computer networks and Telecommunication. 100 projects have been delivered to our customers. CTO of Twinintel... Read More →

Tuesday October 9, 2018 1:45pm - 2:30pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

2:35pm EDT

Public APIs for Asterisk Media Applications with Kong

Using the current Asterisk API collection to build media-applications has never been more exciting, and its last addition, the Asterisk Restful Interface, is in tune with the times... your clients want to be able to integrate their solutions with your newly created services, and there is no best way to do that than to publish your own public API.This used to mean you had to build your own nginx HTTP proxy and take care of users/credentials management, rate-limiting, api-application routing, ACLs, and all sorts of fun tasks.We will go through fronting some of the most common Asterisk media applications with Kong, an open-source API Gateway and Microservices Management Layer that will take the burden off your shoulders, so you can focus on building more awesome services.

Speakers

Gaston Draque

VoIP development and Deployment Specialist, Nexacomm

Gaston is a VoIP development and deployment specialist at Nexacomm, an IP Telephony supplier and UC systems based in NYC. He has been working with corporate information systems for over 25 years, and with Asterisk since 2005. Gaston holds a B.S in Computer Information Systems, and... Read More →

Tuesday October 9, 2018 2:35pm - 3:15pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

10:00am EDT

Adopt a HaaS Model:Stand Out From Your Competition

Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a proven business model for MSPs and technology solution providers. You sell a total solution to the end-customer. They get the hardware, software, installation, training, and consulting that comes fully managed and all for a single monthly payment. Attend this session and learn:•What products and services can and should be bundled into a HaaS offering•How to position, market and sell to the end-customer•How to finance and profit from HaaSPresented by Frank Yuhasz, business development manager, Jenne, Inc., and Susan Elder, senior director of marketing, Jenne, Inc.

Speakers

Susan Elder

Senior Director of Marketing, Jenne

Susan Elder joined Jenne, Inc. in 2012 after 20+ years of experience in marketing and corporatecommunications and sales leadership positions for various companies and organizations. At Jenne, Elderleads the company’s marketing function which provides marketing programs and services... Read More →

Frank Yuhasz

Business Development Manager, Jenne, Inc.

Frank serves as business development manager for Digium at Jenne, Inc., a value added distributor of technology products and solutions focusing on unified communications and collaboration, data networking, video conferencing, premise security, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the... Read More →

Wednesday October 10, 2018 10:00am - 10:45am EDT
Kissimmee

Business

11:15am EDT

Asterisk in the Contact Centre: survey results

In 2014, Loway ran a call-center survey for the Asterisk platform; we were not aware of previous work in that area, and we found a lot of interest.This year, we plan to launch a similar survey and we plan to offer it not just to QueueMetrics users (our customer base) but to the community of Asterisk contact centres in general.

Which model of PBX is the most used worldwide?
How satisfied are customers and users?
How big are Asterisk call-centers?
And more!

Speakers

Lorenzo Emilitri

Director, Loway SA

Lorenzo, the founder of Loway, loves building software that works and reliably solves real-world problems. Recently, he worked on creating and deploying hosted services for contact centers, using Java, Clojure, Docker and Kafka to scale out and provide highly elastic and resilient... Read More →

Wednesday October 10, 2018 11:15am - 12:00pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

1:00pm EDT

Practical Impact of Telecom Fraud

As communications services are more and more connected to various public or private clouds it is important to look at how to keep them secure. This can be from the remote SIP device or mobile app that connects to the hosted server, all the way through to the actual server or servers. In addition to protecting SIP endpoints, it’s also important to make sure the human-factor is aware to all the recent types and methods used by attackers to commit credit-card fraud.

This session will present some of the more-common ways to use call-centers as a proxy for placing fraudulent orders and stealing goods and how to address this kind of attacks.

As always, there will be a review of recent telecom attacks and how to protect against them.

Speakers

Eric Klein

COO, Cloudonix.io

Mentor for technology-oriented startups and VoIP security and fraud specialist, Eric oversees the day-to-day operations at Cloudonix so the developers can focus on turning caffeine into code. Spanning 30 years' experience in network and communication systems, having served as fraud... Read More →

Or Polaczek

Lead Mobile Engineer, Forter

"I am a software developer with 8+ years of experience. As a Research Engineer at Forter, i'm developing new methods aimed to help e-commerce merchants prevent credit-card fraud on their website / call centre. Before I've started working at Forter, I helped creating a cross-platform... Read More →

Wednesday October 10, 2018 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

3:00pm EDT

Penetrating the Government with your Products and Services

Why do we believe having a GSA contract is so important? Have you ever tried to rent a car without a credit card? The same scenario exists. The government cannot just buy from you. You need a contract vehicle for the buyer to place an order against. A GSA contract is the fastest and the easiest way to get a 'number' to make the buyer's job easier. Many companies believe that simply registering with SAM (System for Award Management) will net you business. Nothing could be further from the truth. SAM registration is required before you can do business with the government, that's all. You must have a contract vehicle for the buyer to place an order against. Get started now with your own GSA contract. The myth is that a company can succeed without a contract and continue to accept open market orders of $3,500 or less. This violates the CICA (Competition in Contracting Act) and is illegal for multiple purchases. The buyer must combine these requirements and place an order with a contract holder. Do not get caught in this web, get your GSA contract now.

Speakers

Michael Price

Manager, MarketUS, LLC

Since MarketUS® was founded in 1986, it has represented some of the top names in the industry, including Johns-Manville (a Berkshire Hathaway Company), List Industries, Airbus InFocus, Yahoo, EDS, Jabra, Ameritech, Hyundai, TRW, Total Gym, Fire-Dex and Harvard Business School, Top... Read More →

Wednesday October 10, 2018 3:00pm - 3:45pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

3:45pm EDT

Geek to CEO - My Personal Asterisk Story

VoIP gives the promise of great profits and an ever growing market potential. What most people don't realise, is that in order to succeed, being a highly technical person isn't enough. I started my Asterisk life as a Tech-Geek, almost 16 years ago, with Asterisk version 0.god_know_what. Since then I've traded places several times. Tech-Geek to CTO, CTO to Freelance Developer, Developer to Architect and finally Architect to CEO. I have suffered personal loss, managed to achieve things others didn't - and learned a few things along the way.

Speakers

Nir Simionovich

CEO, cloudonix.io

Entrepreneur and CEO of Cloudonix.io, Nir leads the cloudonix innovative infrastructure backbone solution with the goal of helping companies enrich their apps and products. Nir is a professional Asterisk application and platforms developer with a flair for platform development in... Read More →

Wednesday October 10, 2018 3:45pm - 4:30pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business

10:00am EDT

How to Get VICIdial Contact Center Clusters Talking to each other, and more new features

How the Asterisk-based VICIdial Open-Source outbound call center solution can be set up to talk to other separate VICIdial clusters, including passing call data, customer data and coordinating outbound transfer campaign call pacing. Other new major VICIdial features that will be covered are: European GDPR utilities, Inbound preserve place in line, Inbound Closing Time actions, State and Areacode based shared CallerID Groups, The Real-Time Whiteboard multi-report, and many more new features.

Speakers

Matt Florell

President, VICIdial Group

Matt Florell has over twenty years of experience in building and managing corporate IT systems specializing in Call Center systems, IP telephony, Customer Relationship Management(CRM) systems, databases, scalable applications, and system optimization. Matt is currently the President... Read More →

Thursday October 11, 2018 10:00am - 10:45am EDT
Kissimmee

Business

10:45am EDT

Voice Biometrics for Speaker Verification and Identification

Security in companies has never been more important. Authenticating users is increasingly more difficult while fraud is also increasing. Voice Biometrics offers a powerful new tool to authenticate customers and employees and also detect fraudsters. Asterisk is an excellent platform for adding voice biometrics capability, thus making voice an additional factor in any authorization process. Use cases with Asterisk exist with fully automated inbound and outbound IVR as well as with passive authentication and fraud detection during a call. This presentation will explain the basics of voice biometrics technology, describe real-world deployments, and delineate the multiple ways to include both active and passive voice biometrics in an Asterisk environment. The session will also include demonstrations of live deployments from Asterisk partners who have integrated voice biometric services into their solutions.

Speakers

Peter Soufleris

CEO and Founder, Voice Biometrics Group

IT executive with broad and direct experience in sales, consulting, design, delivery, and customer service within a variety of software and information services companies. Equally adept at working with C-level executives and business issues or technology executives and their issues... Read More →

Thursday October 11, 2018 10:45am - 11:30am EDT
Kissimmee

Business

12:00pm EDT

Why IVR is Important

Earlier this year, the marketing team at Digium produced a go-to document: "Why is an IVR Important? Using Interactive Voice Recognition to Improve Customer Experience and Drive Business Growth" -- an amazing primer on mistakes to avoid and ways to elevate your IVR. In it are many quotes and suggestions from Allison Smith -- the Voice of Asterisk -- who beings the document to life at Astricon, in this presentation highlighting the various points and suggestions about making your IVR smooth, professional, and the very best it can be.

Speakers

Allison Smith

CEO, The IVR Voice.com

Allison Smith is proud to have been the Voice of Asterisk since its inception. If you’ve maneuvered through prompts while calling a Fortune 500 company, participated in a telephone customer satisfaction survey, signed onto a conference call, listened to the public airwaves, took... Read More →

Thursday October 11, 2018 12:00pm - 12:45pm EDT
Kissimmee

Business