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Gary Ford

About the Author

For more than 13 years, Gary Ford has been privileged to work for many large systems

integration companies, Cisco Advanced Technology Partners, and end customers, designing,

deploying and maintaining Cisco telephony and contact center solutions. His introductory

role to contact centers started in 1997 while working for British Telecom (BT) as

a test engineer tasked with integrating the GeoTel ICR platform into BT’s core telephony

network. Over the following years, Cisco acquired GeoTel and rapidly transformed the

ICR product set to include solutions from other Cisco acquisitions and a great deal of inhouse

innovation. His role has changed over the years from test engineer to contact center

and unified communications consultant. Gary spends much of his time designing and

deploying Cisco unified communications solutions for a wide range of customers. Gary

also holds a bachelor's of engineering degree in computer systems engineering, the status

of Chartered Engineer, and several Cisco, Microsoft, and business-related professional

qualifications.

 

About the Technical Reviewers

Carlos Gonzales, manager of Software Development Engineering, is one of the technical

managers in the Customer Contact Business Unit in Boxborough, Massachusetts, where

he has been working as an engineering manager for the past year. In his current role, he is

involved in quality assurance testing, release engineering, and systems engineering activities

with respect to the customer contact applications. Before becoming a manager, he

held a software engineer and technical leader position for seven years in the Voice

Technology Group Solution Test team focused on solution-level testing of UCCE, CVP,

CUCM, CUP, CUSP, CTIOS, CAD, UCS, Outbound in Standalone, Distributed, CoW,

and Parent/Child deployment models. During his tenure as an engineer, he had the privilege

of leading and participating in validating the UCCE system in an end-to-end Cisco

solution, as documented in the Cisco validated design guides (aka SRND). Currently, as a

manager on the CCBU team, he has been privileged to work with UCCE development,

test, and field engineers in deploying UCCE in a UCS, VMware, and EMC data center

environment. Carlos holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and is the recipient of

multiple Cisco, Microsoft, and VMware certifications in addition to more than 15 years

in the networking industry.

 

Alan Quinn, NCE Advanced Services Europe, is one of the senior consulting engineers in

the Unified Customer Contact team in London, U.K. In his current role, he is involved in

developing Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) that includes Hosted UCCE, CVP, and

CUCM; the solution is to be built on UCS technology. Before joining Cisco as an NCE,

he held a position with a large European service provider as customer design authority

for five years. This role focused on planning, designing, implementation, and operation of

large contact center solutions that used the NAM/CICM deployment model. Alan has

more than 14 years of experience in the communications industry and holds several

Cisco voice certifications.