The Open Source movement has duplicated the traditional vendor solutions in all areas of telecom from call control to network management. Has the model for deployment been changed as well, or is this a tool to make software hardware independent? These panelists share the value proposition of using open source solutions and telling the what, where, when, why, and how of open source deployments.

Peter R. Badovinatz, Senior Technical Staff Member, is responsible for guiding IBM's contributions to Linux to support telecommunications systems and application environments.

His roles are to work with customers, industry groups, and across IBM to understand requirements to use to guide LTC development and contributions to Linux keyed to support reliability, high availability, clustering, and related technologies, and to support complex Linux deployments. He is the chair of the Open Source Development Lab's Carrier Grade Linux technical requirements specification subgroup, and is IBM's leading technical representative and a contributing author to the Service Availability Forum's application clustering specification.

As president & chief executive officer of Pingtel, Bill Rich is responsible for the company’s strategic direction, profitability, and aggressive growth plans. Over the past 20 years, Bill has served provided executive guidance at several innovative companies including serving as CEO of Aravox Technologies, which provided session border controllers for service provider VoIP networks and president and CEO at VocalData, a leading provider of feature servers that enable service providers to deliver next-generation IP telephony services.

Bill earned a BA in economics from the College of William and Mary.

Mark Spencer is President and founder of Digium, formerly Linux Support Services, Inc., a Huntsville, AL based company focused on the development and support of low-cost, innovative telecommunications hardware and open source software. Mark, originally from Auburn, AL, graduated in 1999 from Auburn University with a BS in Computer Engineering and founded his company in 2000. Mr. Spencer is the original author of GAIM, the widely popular, multi-protocol instant messanging program for Linux, BSD, and Windows. Mark is also responsible for Asterisk, the Open Source PBX for Linux, BSD, and MacOS.