Always On Technology Symposium 2018

8 a.m. – 9 a.m.
Registration & Breakfast | Atrium Lobby

9 a.m. – 9:05 a.m.
Welcome | Chris Kardos | Event Emcee | Amphitheater

9:05 a.m. – 9:35 a.m.
Opening Keynote | Jason Viera | CTO, NWN Carousel | Amphitheater

9:35 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.
Keynote Presentation | Jean Turgeon | VP & Chief Technologist, Avaya | Amphitheater

10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
Break | Lobby

10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m.
Panel Discussion: Security Success Defined, Moderated by Jason Viera | CTO | NWN Carousel | Amphitheater

Panelists include:

• Jason Albuquerque | CISO, NWN Carousel
• Jon Fredrickson | CISO, BCBS RI
• Reg Harnish | CEO, GreyCastle Security
• Chris DeCarli | Manager, Security Infrastructure Services, FM Global
• Joe Pangborn | CIO, U.S. Naval War College

11:15 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Break | Lobby | Transition to Breakout Sessions

11:30 a.m. – 12:10 p.m.
Breakout Sessions – Round One | Harborview Ballrooms

12:10 p.m. – 1:10 p.m.
Lunch | Cityview Ballroom One

1:10 p.m. – 1:50 p.m.
Breakout Sessions – Round Two | Harborview Ballrooms

1:50 p.m. – 2:05 p.m.
Break | Lobby | Transition to Amphitheater

2:05 p.m. – 2:35 p.m.
Fast Five | Amphitheater | Featuring NWN Carousel Experts:

• Ryan Carricato | Principal Consultant, Collaboration, NWN Carousel
• Keisha Powell Burgess | Senior Systems Engineer, NWN Carousel
• Mark Damphousse | Director, Managed Services, NWN Carousel
• Charlie Beckman | VP, Engineering, East, NWN Carousel
• John Vosburg | Principal Consultant, UC, NWN Carousel

2:35 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.
Keynote Presentation | Todd Nightingale | SVP, General Manager, Cisco Meraki | Amphitheater

3:15 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.
Keynote Presentation | John Duke Logan | America’s Got Talent Contestant | Magician | Amphitheater

3:50 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Capstone | Jason Viera | CTO, NWN Carousel | Amphitheater

4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
After Party, Partner Zone, Passport Prizes, Feat. Cam Neely, President and Former Player, Boston Bruins | Lobby

How the Modern Workforce is Driving a Cultural Shift Towards Collaboration

Since their inception more than a decade ago, unified communication and collaboration tools have primarily been a solution driven by IT departments with mixed adoption results. The millennial generation who grew up in the early PC and internet days, coupled with the mobility boom of smartphones, mean today’s workforce demand seamless collaboration and productivity tools. The days of employees reporting to brick and mortar buildings and “business hours” are being replaced with collaboration tools that connect team members at any time, wherever they are—their home, on the road, or vacationing in another country. And, the increased adoption of cloud services has accelerated the ability for businesses to not only roll out these productivity tools, but also ensure proprietary data is secured.

Join Carousel’s Brian Mahoney, Director of Collaboration Solutions, and Tony McQueen, Senior Director of UC & Collaboration, as they give insight to where the collaboration market is headed and how other companies are rolling out these solutions and initiating their digital transformation strategies.

Next-Generation Meeting Room & Video Collaboration Trends

The way we collaborate is changing—from what defines a meeting room to understanding and enhancing the user experience. With dozens of software platforms and hardware devices infiltrating the market, navigating the UC landscape and choosing the right solution for your business becomes more and more difficult.

In this session, Carousel’s Brian Fichter, Director of Portfolio Strategy & Video Collaboration, will take you through next-generation meeting rooms and video collaboration trends, including innovative, near-future technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Digital Workplace (Ideation).

Strategies for Success in Contact Center Design and Deployment

Customer satisfaction in the contact center space relies heavily on careful analysis and upfront planning. There are several common pitfalls that can often lead to contact center’s functionality not meeting expectations, like:

• Failing to look at the experience from both the customer and agent standpoints;
• Not involving the operations side of the business in the procurement process;
• Miscalculating what portion of the customer experience can be automated with self-service;
• Failing to stitch together customer context across all channels;
• Underestimating the technical skills and development requirements;

In addition to understanding how to avoid these common pitfalls, we will also explore the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and sentiment analysis that, if leveraged properly, can lead to higher levels of end-user satisfaction.

Join Paul Berardis, Carousel’s Director of Contact Center Services, to discuss some of the proper elements to help avoid these pitfalls to achieve success in the contact center.

Ransomware Defense Strategies

As an IT professional, it goes without saying that ransomware is likely a top of mind for threat which you need to combat. You’ve seen headlines about the damage done to an organization at the hand of ransomware and you’ve likely been bombarded by vendors and their technologies that promise to solve the problem of ransomware with one swift silver-bulleted purchase. The catch with ransomware though, is that having a silver bullet is useless without the gun.

It could be argued that there are more dangerous threats than ransomware in the wild, but ransomware is loud and noisy. A malicious actor that has penetrated a network with an objective to steal critical information is not going to be quite so bold. However, the measures to protect our infrastructure and critical data sets are the same.

What ransomware has done, is shine a light on IT organizations as a whole. A light which shines brightly on that fact that we may be behind in adopting a layered security approach with up-to-date best practices. And not only that, some of those best practices are now out of date—and they need to be updated, and now.

Join Alec Saffrin, Carousel’s Technical Director of Security, to discuss what an assembly of the right mix of people, process, and technologies might look like to combat this evolving threat landscape.

Enforcement and Containment with Segmentation

You don’t have to look far to find a current news story about ransomware taking down networks in record time, or a data breach by a malicious actor that has hidden in a company’s environment for months.

In an “Assumption of Breach” world, we accept that it’s statistically impossible to keep all the bad guys away from our sensitive information and out of our environments. We recognize that at some point, we will receive a phone call or email that says it’s happened to our organization. Knowing that these scenarios may happen, doesn’t mean we are powerless against them. We have the tools and practices to help limit the impact that such an incident can have on our business, we just have to exercise them.

Segmentation is one of those practices that can significantly impact a company’s overall security posture, but its impact depends on how well it’s implemented. The industry has been using VLANs for segmentation for decades, but they are combat ineffective when it comes to stopping the spread of ransomware and other malicious threats.

We need to look at more advanced capabilities like data center next-generation firewalls, micro-segmentation practices, behavior analytics, and even network access control (NAC) among others, to help us contain, mitigate, and eventually remediate the threats that face us.

Join Josh King, Carousel’s Director of Security Solutions, to discuss what an assembly of the right mix of people, process, and technologies might look like to combat this evolving threat landscape.

Success in Security

If our jobs in security are never complete—and there is always the risk of breach—how can we measure success? In a world where failure is all but certain, what qualifies as success?

Join Jason Viera, Carousel CTO, and a panel comprised of industry leaders and security service providers, to talk about how we can qualify success in this current threat landscape. And, how we can evangelize the positive strides we are making day-to-day in our organizations, instead of merely focusing on the negative.

SD-WAN, Campus Fabrics, and Software-Defined Networks: Emerging Concepts in Next-Gen Network Architectures

The network serves as the digital plumbing that enables every aspect of communication and leaders expect 100% uptime all the time. However, in practice, the network is often the cause of application performance issues or even worse—outages. Surprisingly, many organizations struggle to adequately design and account for testing for network resiliency when deploying or upgrading their network.

In this session, Carousel’s own packet whisperer John Elliott (CCIE&CCDE) will take you through a brief history of common network architectures, as well as cover emerging concepts surrounding campus and wide area networks with an emphasis on design and protocol trade-offs. Maybe he’ll even answer the age-old question of how organizations can minimize or eliminate Spanning-Tree from their network or break through the noise that surrounds SD-WAN.

Failing to Plan Spells Disaster for Wireless Networks

During the past 15 years, wireless has shifted from a “nice-to-have” to a utility, and the requirements for design, coverage, and density have also gone through a significant amount of change; the average number of devices per client has increased, the number of contending wireless networks has increased, and the overall bandwidth that is consumed by wireless networks has also risen.

Updated design is arguably one of the most important components of a wireless rollout that is often ignored by IT staff looking to perform a one-for-one replacement of existing APs. There is a common assumption that because wireless standards have changed, the quality of the WLAN will change, as well; this is not always the case.

In this breakout session, Carousel’s Chris Williams, SE Manager and ACDX, will review wireless design best practices, some of the history of wireless standards, and talk about the impact of increased devices, mobility on the WLAN, and changing requirements as we look to the future. He will also touch on 802.11AX and the implications that will have on wireless for future rollouts. Finally, Chris will also walk the audience through the types of wireless surveys and design methodologies used to ensure a positive end-user experience.

HyperConverged: The Untold Story

HyperConverged has quickly become all the rage, and yet there still exists many use cases where it’s not an ideal fit based on application and storage requirements. Caveats abound in the world of HCI as it pertains to the addition of new nodes and sizing is often obfuscated as manufacturers tout high levels of deduplication and compression.

In this session, join Manuel Henry, Carousel’s Principal Data Center Consultant, to go beyond vendor marketing and dive into the world of HCI pitfalls and solution fit. We’ll also explore some of the no-brainer use cases for HCIS and discuss whether those Tier One applications really belong on that shiny new HCI Platform.

Testimonials

Accommodations:

This year’s AOTS hotel accommodations will be held at the beautiful Seaport Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. Overlooking the Boston Harbor and backed by beautiful city and water views, Seaport is the ideal location for business or family-friendly escapes, with easy access to Logan Airport, the financial district and all major Boston attractions. The hotel’s residential style décor makes you feel at home, and an onsite bar, free Wi-Fi and complimentary access to one of the city’s finest health clubs elevates your stay.

To book your room for our AOTS event on November 8th, please call the front desk at (617) 385-4514.

For any questions regarding your hotel accommodations, please contact our events manager, Kim Riley.

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