Jean-Francois Raffestin, former Vice-President Business Development & Strategic Alliances at Polycom Inc., now provides consulting, training and speaker services in the interactive multimedia communication field.

His international carrier was split half in the IT industry, with 15 years at Univac (mainframe computers) and 9 years at Datapoint (networking), the second half in the interactive multimedia communication world, first at PictureTel where he launched the desktop videoconferencing activity, and then at Polycom where he worked on several missions, including the setting up of a Vertical Markets business activity focussing on HealthCare and Education, and the management of the strategic alliances that Polycom was building with telephony companies like Alcatel, Avaya, Nortel, or IT firms like Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.

Today, Jean-François Raffestin concentrate on the application side of interactive multimedia communication; he provides strategic and operational support to companies willing to develop the usage of those technologies, train on how to best use the solutions offered by vendors, and speak at numerous venues and events on various sujects such as 'the future of video and its integration within Unified Communication', or 'how can technology help business nomadism' and 'communicate in 2020', a glimpse at the future of business communications.