Niels Brunsgaard, CCIE No. 1544, has been with Cisco Systems as a consulting engineer since 1999, specializing in IP telephony. He has been involved in the planning, design, and implementation of a dozen IP telephony networks throughout Asia Pacific and North America. Niels holds a bachelor’s degree in electro-mechanical engineering from the Denmark Technical University in Copenhagen, and a master’s degree in telecommunications from the University of Colorado. He is a double CCIE, with certification in voice in addition to routing and switching.

Mark Gallo is a technical manager with America Online, where he leads a group of engineers responsible for the design and deployment of the domestic corporate intranet. His network certifications include Cisco CCNP and Cisco CCDP. He has led several engineering groups responsible for designing and implementing enterprise LANs and international IP networks. He has a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. Mark resides in northern Virginia with his wife, Betsy, and son, Paul.

Abderrahmane Mounir, CCIE No. 4312, is a network consulting engineer at the Cisco Systems Advanced Services Group in San Jose. He has been working with large-scale IP telephony customers in planning, designing, implementing, and operating IP telephony networks since CallManager release 2.3. He has helped customers to successfully deploy and migrate large IP telephony deployments. He represents Cisco by presenting IPT end-to-end solutions and troubleshooting sessions at Networkers and other internal forums. He has also contributed to the creation and the design of the CCIE voice track. Abderrahmane holds a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering.

Gert Vanderstraeten has been working as a telecom/datacom engineer for companies such as Alcatel, Bell, and Lucent Technologies since 1993. Between 1998 and 2002, he was an independent contractor for the Cisco Systems IT department. During this period, his main focus was the implementation, maintenance, and design of VoIP, IP telephony, voice, and video applications, and the integration of Cisco AVVID technologies into large-scale solutions. In September 2002, he became a member of the technical staff and was operating until May 2004 within the Cisco Systems global enterprise architecture solutions team. Gert is currently working in the Advisory Services team as enterprise architect, where he takes on responsibility for large-scale customer deployments.