Rich Tehrani’s Executive Suite is a high level interview between Rich Tehrani, president and
group editor-in-chief of TMC, and leading communications executives. The goal is to allow
those being interviewed to impart their thoughts regarding their leadership roles within their
companies and within the industry as a whole.

Tekelec’s Frank Plastina


Frank Plastina
CEO
Tekelec

We will continue to focus on our ability to provide the session control technology into the network. What I mean by that is the layer that connects the access piece and the applications from the network. That is traditionally what Tekelec has done very well as a company.
www.tekelec.com

Centillium’s Faraj Aalaei


Faraj Aalaei
CEO
Centillium

Centillium CEO Faraj Aalaei is the guiding force behind the company’s successful track record as
a leading innovator of high performance, cost effective semiconductor solutions for “last mile” broadband access deployments.
www.centillium.com

Developments In IP Communications and IMS

Harald Braun
President of the Networks Division
Siemens

As President of the Networks Division of Siemens Communications in the United States, Harald
Braun leads operations for the following product groups: wireless networks, broadband
solutions, photonics, next generation switching products and solutions, and digital home.
www.siemens.com

VoIP Market Adoption Trends


Phil Asmundson
Vice Chairman & Nat'l Managing Partner
Deloitte & Touche

In his more than 24 years of experience with TMT
clients, Mr. Asmundson has worked with virtually all segments of the
communications industry including LECs, CLECs, Optic Networks, Wireless
and Satellite. He is one of the firm’s designated “thought leaders”
and is an active speaker and author on industry trends, challenges
and opportunities.
www.deloitte.com

Developments In IP Communications and IMS


Hassan Ahmed
CEO, Sonus Networks

The company was around from the beginning and has been a
true pioneer in VoIP. There are many companies today competing
head to head with Sonus who downplayed VoIP and the products Sonus
sold in the late nineties, yet now Sonus is a benchmark that many
other companies aim for.
www.sonusnet.com

VoIP’s Path to Prime Time to be Paved by Education

Jeff Ahlquist
VP Corporate Development & Strategy, Covad

Jeff thinks the biggest barrier is market education and the validation of
VoIP as a technology ready for prime time. He believes demand generation
is another barrier. From here, our conversation turned to pure hosted
VoIP providers. Covad doesn’t want to be considered a pure hosted VoIP
provider; they understand there is more to the market than just hosted
solutions and not every company wants to go this route.
www.covad.com

VoIP Is an Open Operating System for Communications Apps

Charlie Langdon
President

Langdon has a very complete vision of where things are going -- and where we've
been. He reviewed how the computer industry went from mainframes to client-server
based architecture and how over time applications become less and less centralized.
A good portion of our talk was devoted to how customers have become more
empowered in the information technology world looking back twenty years.
www.necunified.com

Premier Carrier in Our Footprint


Aaron Cowell, CEO
US LEC

How many CLECs never had a layoff and want to be called a CLEC these days? US LEC
is one such company. I had a chance to speak with their CEO Aaron Cowell, who
tells me their goal from the inception has been to become the premier competitive
carrier in their footprint. The last three words of this simple mission statement
are probably what allowed the company to make it through the telecom downturn,
as many other CLECs were trying to be the largest competitive carrier and not the best.
www.uslec.com

Arbinet Launches Commercial VoIP Peering

Steve Heap, CTO
Arbinet

Founded in 1996, Arbinet is one of the oldest telecom exchanges that trades,
routes and settles voice traffic and Internet capacity on behalf of its 385
service voice members and 230 Internet access members. Its primary revenue
model is collecting a membership fee plus a per-minute charge for handling a
trade...
www.arbinet.com

TalkSwitch Proves What's In A Name


Jan Scheeren, CEO
TalkSwitch

After a 30-minute conversation with Scheeren, an Australian native who is given to
peppering his analysis with surfing analogies, one thing is clear: he understands the
big picture. Indeed, there is a refreshing pragmatism about Scheeren, which he
revealed while discussing myriad topics, which ranged from the difficulty in
identifying TalkSwitch’s competition to his philosophy on hardware manufacturing.
Scheeren’s down-to-earth approach is reflected in his company’s recent decision...
www.talkswitch.com