AVST and NEC Corporation of America Expand Global Footprint For Unified Communications

Integration of NEC Active Voice Division into AVST Strengthens Unified Communications Market Position for Both Companies

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. and IRVING, Texas, April 5, 2010 – Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) and NEC Corporation of America (NEC) today announced a long-term strategic technology relationship including the integration of Active Voice, a division of NEC, into AVST.  In addition to seamlessly integrating AVST’s CallXpress^® Unified Communications (UC) platform with NEC’s world class IP telephony and UC solutions, AVST will continue to manufacture, support and enhance specific Active Voice product offerings for NEC, its channel partners and the independent Active Voice channel. 

This relationship increases the global footprint of both companies for UC and the addition of the Active Voice division significantly increases AVST’s addressable customer base with a combined 140,000 systems sold worldwide, to date.  Additionally, the integration expands AVST’s position in the UC marketplace with a broader set of product offerings, access to additional distribution channels and expanded engineering resources for accelerated innovation.  For NEC, the partnership provides integration of its advanced solutions with AVST’s CallXpress UC platform and expanded sales channel opportunities.  The terms of the transaction are not disclosed. 

The new relationship further validates the commitment of both companies to deliver world class UC solutions for small, medium and enterprise-class customers that are highly interoperable, scalable and tailored to meet the needs of individual businesses.  AVST brings three decades of experience and leadership in the UC marketplace and leverages its core strength of delivering solutions that transform individual, group and enterprise productivity while enabling organizations to maximize the return on their strategic telecom and IT infrastructure investments.  NEC, a leading provider and integrator of advanced communications solutions, continues to offer advanced unified communications for businesses and vertical organizations that meet business process improvement needs. 

“We are honored and privileged to enter into this long term strategic technology relationship with NEC.  Extending our relationship with one of the most prestigious global UC solution providers in the market while maintaining our strong independent and interoperable product offerings is a positive step for our customers and our channel,” said Hardy Myers, President & CEO of AVST.  “We are also very excited to integrate the Active Voice team and its products into AVST, thereby enabling us to extend our global reach and accelerate our position in the UC market.” 

“AVST has been a technology and distribution partner of NEC for many years,” said Ram Menghani, General Manager, Product Management for NEC Corporation of America.  “The expanded technology relationship and the corresponding acquisition of Active Voice announced today, reflects our strong mutual commitment to our customers and expanding NEC’s global position in the UC market.  We believe that this relationship will help accelerate the customer adoption of our mutual product offerings.”

About NEC Corporation of America
Headquartered in Irving, Texas, NEC Corporation of America is a leading provider of innovative IT, network and communications products and solutions for service carriers, Fortune 1000 and SMB businesses across multiple vertical industries, including Healthcare, Government, Education and Hospitality.  NEC Corporation of America delivers one of the industry’s broadest portfolios of technology solutions and professional services, including unified communications, wireless, voice and data, managed services, server and storage infrastructure, optical network systems, microwave radio communications and biometric security.  NEC Corporation of America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation, a global technology leader with operations in 30 countries and more than $42 billion in revenues.  For more information, please visit www.necam.com.

© 2010 NEC Corporation of America. NEC is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Other product or service marks mentioned are the trademarks of their respective owners.

About AVST

Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of Unified Communications solutions with over 15 million users relying on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With three decades of innovation excellence, AVST is solely focused on delivering communications solutions that increase individual, group and enterprise productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers best in class interoperability, scalability and resiliency while delivering advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can uniquely protect and extend its existing IT and telephony infrastructure investments — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices throughout the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

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AVST Showcases CallXpress 8 at VoiceCon Orlando

Demonstrates Powerful Unified Communications Solution; Highlights Interoperability, Productivity and Resiliency

ORLANDO, Fla., March 22, 2010 – This week at VoiceCon® Orlando 2010, Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST), a leading developer of communications solutions, will be showcasing its flagship Unified Communications (UC) platform, CallXpress® 8.  AVST can be located in booth #737 on the show floor at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center. In addition, AVST Chief Technology Officer, Tom Minifie, is participating in a VoiceCon breakout session titled, “How Much Voice Mail Do You Really Need?” on Wednesday, March 24th at 8:00 AM.

VoiceCon Orlando 2010 is focused on using communications to transform the enterprise.  As enterprises build their next generation IP telephony solution, they find themselves turning to a new set of applications that increase user and business productivity. One such application is AVST’s CallXpress.  For nearly three decades, CallXpress has been transforming productivity through applications like call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification, while integrating into the organization’s existing and future infrastructure.  CallXpress enables organizations of all sizes to facilitate their enterprise migration from legacy TDM call processing and voicemail to IP-enabled UC, while delivering the interoperability, feature depth and resiliency required in a next generation solution.

“VoiceCon is an important annual event for AVST and gives us the opportunity to meet with our customers and partners to share ideas, business strategies, programs, and solutions,” said Denny Michael, AVST Vice President of Marketing.  “Our customers are here to gain valuable information that they can leverage for their business.  We always enjoy the opportunity to meet at VoiceCon and share our product roadmap and vision for the future.”

CallXpress 8 is highly interoperable. With over 250 TDM and IP integrations and the ability to support multiple switches, CallXpress aligns with the key capabilities that organizations are demanding. In addition, CallXpress allows organizations to consolidate and centralize their voicemail system to improve business efficiency while enhancing the bottom line.  With scalability up to 384 ports, CallXpress supports a centralized, distributed or mixed telephony infrastructure.

For more information about the AVST product line, please visit the company’s website at www.avst.com.

VoiceCon Breakout Session Description: How Much Voice Mail Do You Really Need?
Voice messaging systems became part of the landscape because phones need to be answered whether or not the called party was available. But with presence, IM and related Unified Communications applications and capabilities, there are new ways to assess the value voice messaging and Unified Messaging do, or don't, deliver. This session will analyze the new options becoming available, and the different ways to calculate ROI.

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

 

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Is Exchange 2010 a Replacement for Legacy Voicemail?

One of the great things about my job as a Technical Trainer is that I get to test drive, then use, some of the newest and coolest software packages. And, to the annoyance of my friends in the IT field, I mostly don't have to deal with the problems in deployment or the day-to-day drudgery of managing an enterprise. I guess that's a nice way of saying I understand their pain, without having to endure any of it myself.

I recently attended Exchange 2010 Ignite training. Three days of test driving the latest and greatest iteration of Microsoft's email system. It's quite an impressive product, loaded with new functionality and redesigned for unbelievable degree of robustness. While there I spent some time exploring something near and dear to my heart, their implementation of Unified Messaging (UM).  It was great to learn a bit about deploying Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging in the context of a legacy voicemail replacement - an area where I spent a considerable amount of time.

The last slide of the last lecture had a fascinating bullet point - "A  Natural Replacement for Legacy Voicemail". What you'll find while comparing a legacy voicemail to Exchange is that a lot of those "Legacy Features" such as voice distribution lists and cascading pager notifications are missing. This may not be a huge deal, since your company may not use them anyhow. However, it suffices to say that it's not a voicemail system but an implementation of voice into a more email mail centric system. It's a tradeoff -  legacy functionality for more a more modern feature set. Assuming  of course that you want those new features and can live without the legacy ones such as voice mail networking with legacy systems via VPIM or AMIS or replacing a familiar telephone user interface (TUI) with an unusual version.

Upgrading to Exchange 2010 requires a fork lift upgrade. There is no process to upgrade your existing 2003 or 2007 systems. However,  Exchange 2010 is 2003 and 2007 capable. Meaning, you can have both 2003 and 2007 systems in your Exchange 2010 enterprise. So you don't upgrade, you add the new system then move the users over . Although you can go right from 2007 to 2010 in controlled manner,  you cannot upgrade your 2007 UM though, only move those users.

One thing I found vexing in both 2007 and now again in 2010 Unified Messaging is how tedious it is to manage voice features for an Exchange user. Although the management interface has been streamlined and improved I found it tough  to go back and view or make changes once I set up a voice user. Near as I could figure, I could enable or disable UM for a user, anything else, I'd have to use a wizard again.

The last two criticisms I have deal with Speech. Speech recognition is a processor intensive function, not only on Exchange but on a CallXpress system as well. Speech also has a few subtleties that one should think about in an administration context (Hence, it makes sense to be able to make user changes easy). Take name changes for instance. What happens when "Holly Holt" gets married and now is Holly Smythe, only pronounced "Smith". What if she wants her old name, her new name, and maybe "Holly Holt-Smythe" as well? We can do this. We can also handle both Holly Smythe and Olly Smith by a few tweaks in administration. By the way, I asked that exact question in the class.

I got the reaction I probably deserved by asking such a thing at 4PM on a Friday. I'll blame it on that rather than any product deficiencies. I spent  a bit of time trying to explore this further on the web and couldn't land anywhere that described sizing, speech recognition, and disambiguation.

MS Exchange 2010 also supports Speech to Text. The caller leaves a voicemail message, and Exchange converts it to a text email. Very slick. We've had that with our "got-voice" integration for some time. We were given what I'd describe as an oblique warning that this is processor intensive and we shouldn’t give it to every user. Suffices to say, too much of a good thing here is probably a bad thing. I couldn't find much info anywhere on that either, other than everyone agreeing it was cool. I'm guessing that since I've heard that it's speech to text transcription accuracy is less than 50%, the more users added means the less likely the messages will be transcribed properly.

Not that I'm trying to be mean, these two features are very cool. There are, however, a lot of problems that pop up during speech deployment. CallXpress has the tools to deal with these issues and without making light of the complexities, they are pretty straight forward.

Make no mistake, it's a cool system with lots of other cutting edge features such as Rights Management, Exchange Online (Cloud access),  a very cool new look and feel to both Outlook and OWA, and awesome high availability and archiving capability. The way Microsoft has redesigned the architecture, with it's resulting many-fold increase in hardware efficiency, probably makes the upgrade worthwhile.

However, Unified Messaging was disappointing. With it's ability to integrate to all versions of Exchange (2010 soon to come, no doubt) CallXpress allows you to add UM capabilities as awesome and rich as these new features while at the same time providing true legacy voicemail replacement and continuity during an upgrade.

Original Post:  http://www.avst.com/blog/2010/02/is-exchange-2010-a-replacement-for-legacy-voicemail/

 

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Sharp HealthCare Selects CallXpress 8 for Centralized Communications Network

Replaces End of Life Octel^® System and Achieves High Availability

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., February 10, 2010 – Communications solutions innovator Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) today announced that CallXpress^® 8 was selected by Sharp HealthCare (Sharp), San Diego’s largest and most comprehensive healthcare organization, to centralize its infrastructure.  Sharp selected CallXpress due to its ability to centralize three standalone Octel http://www.avst.com/callxpress_resource_center/voicemail/index.asp%27%20alt=%27Voicemail%20Resource%20Center%27%3E%3Cb%3Evoicemail%3C/b%3E%3C/a%3E/index.asp">voicemail systems onto a single system, while offering dual survivable call servers to protect against critical network failures.

Sharp is a not-for-profit integrated regional health care leader with more than 12 facilities including seven hospitals, two medical groups, medical clinics, urgent care centers, skilled nursing facilities as well as a variety of other community health education programs and related services.  Sharp serves more than three million people, operates 1,870 beds and has approximately 2,600 physicians on medical staffs, more than 1,000 physicians in affiliated medical groups and more than 14,000 employees.

Sharp needed to replace three Octel voicemail systems that were announced ‘end of life.’ The main objective was to identify a solution that offered centralization, thereby eliminating the required maintenance for those Octel systems, and the risk of end users being without voicemail service in the event of a critical system failure.  Sharp conducted an extensive review process with a Technical Review Committee tasked with identifying the right solution.  AVST’s CallXpress was selected in large part for its high availability and the ability to support its mixed TDM/hybrid switches and IP PBXs.

Sharp took great care to ensure the transition from Octel to CallXpress was a smooth process for end users and cites the ease of use in CallXpress as instrumental in the process. “The migration from Octel to CallXpress was one of our biggest implementations and the transition was virtually unnoticeable to our users.  They didn’t need much training since the CallXpress system mimicked the command structure of the Octel telephone user interface (TUI). On the day of the CallXpress cutover, our support staff team members were waiting for help desk calls that never came,” said Steve Cates, Sharp HealthCare Telecommunications Manager.

Today, the Sharp network has three major hub PBXs that are fully redundant and CallXpress supports nearly 4,000 voicemail users and handles approximately 495,000 calls per month.  Outside callers utilize more than 70 system-wide automated attendant menus in CallXpress that efficiently route them to the physician, hospital, department or employee they’re trying to reach.

With call volumes of this magnitude, and with physicians and hospitals relying on uninterrupted communications, CallXpress provides the high availability that Sharp demanded. Sharp now achieves high availability by utilizing a system server and two call servers. In this configuration, if either of the call servers fails, the other is able to answer and process calls, as well as record messages, without the loss of CallXpress application functionality.

Cates added, “Before CallXpress, system maintenance was a real challenge.  We had three separate systems that had to be maintained and everything had to be done after hours to ensure that physicians, staff and other essential personnel had access to voicemail during business hours.  If one system went down, we had a critical situation on our hands with no backup in place and thousands of messages that could be lost.  The CallXpress multiple call server architecture has brought us peace of mind.”

In addition to centralization, CallXpress offered Sharp HealthCare a robust platform with features that make users more accessible and mobile.  CallXpress comes with multiple mobility features, including unified messaging, personal assistant, http://www.avst.com/callxpress_resource_center/notification/index.asp%27%20alt=%27Notification%20Resource%20Center%27%3E%3Cb%3Enotification%3C/b%3E%3C/a%3E/index.asp">message notification, single number, and speech recognition for hands-free communications.

Sharp worked closely with Advanced Call Processing (ACP), a trusted partner and AVST reseller, to identify the right solution.   “We have a great deal of experience with CallXpress and understand the needs of the Sharp team,” said Rob Simpson, President of ACP.  “CallXpress is a robust solution that can support, with ease, a high call volume, centralized network like Sharp’s.  The Sharp team needed a solution that offered the next level of reliability and CallXpress was a perfect fit.”

 “CallXpress was designed to support the exact scenario that the Sharp network presented,” said Denny Michael, AVST Vice President of Marketing.  “They needed a seamless replacement of their legacy voicemail system, centralization to provide cost savings and high availability for application resiliency. We look forward to supporting Sharp HealthCare as they expand their network and deploy some of the additional functionality available in CallXpress.”

CallXpress 8 delivers a powerful suite of Unified Communications applications including advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities to help businesses become more productive.  For more information about AVST’s products visit the company’s website at www.avst.com. 

About Sharp HealthCare
Sharp HealthCare is San Diego's most comprehensive health care delivery system. It is recognized for clinical excellence for services in cardiac, cancer and multiorgan transplantation, as well as orthopaedics, rehabilitation, behavioral health and women's health. Sharp HealthCare has been widely acclaimed for its commitment to transform the health care experience for patients, physicians and staff through an organization-wide performance improvement initiative called The Sharp Experience. The Sharp system includes four acute-care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, two affiliated medical groups and a health plan. To learn more about Sharp, visit www.sharp.com.           

About Advanced Call Processing (ACP)
Advanced Call Processing (ACP) is a comprehensive provider of telecommunications services and solutions with a customer base spread across the United States and throughout the world.  Established in 1990, ACP has enjoyed exceptional growth, while supplying customized solutions for hundreds of businesses and government agencies.    ACP has assisted hundred of companies to achieve their business goals while controlling costs through the effective deployment of communications technology.

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

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MVD Communications Partners with AVST

MVD Communications Partners with AVST to Sell the Company's CallXpress Unified Communications Platform

Cincinnati, Ohio, February 1, 2010 - MVD Communications, a recognized voice and data solutions provider for companies nationwide, has partnered with Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) to provide their customers CallXpress®, an innovative Unified Communications platform. CallXpress delivers a powerful suite of applications including advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification capabilities to enhance the productivity of users and businesses.

"We work closely with the manufacturers we represent to ensure we are aware of the latest technologies and evaluate new products for efficiency and viability for our company and our clients," said Jeff Black, President and CEO of MVD Communications. "We are very excited to have joined the exclusive list of AVST resellers and look forward to helping our customers as they execute their technology roadmaps," said Black.

MVD is constantly adjusting its business plan to meet the demands of customers in the ever changing world of telecommunications, especially those who are ready to replace their legacy voicemail systems.  CallXpress is a leader in interoperability, integrating with more than 250 TDM, IP, and Centrex telephony switch options, therefore MVD customers can realize the benefits of next-generation enterprise communications solutions while protecting and extending their existing infrastructure.

"Companies of all sizes are actively seeking to replace their first generation communications systems with new technologies," said Denny Michael, AVST Vice President of Marketing. "MVD is a welcome addition to the network of resellers, and with their experience in this market, they are well-positioned to bring the CallXpress Unified Communications solution to customers looking to increase productivity within their organization."

About MVD Communications
With offices in Ohio, Indiana and Florida, as well as a full deployment center in Nebraska, MVD Communications has been providing nationwide service to the business community since 1992. MVD provides full-service telecommunication solutions to business customers through best-of-breed manufacturers such as Avaya, Mitel and others. Services include 24 x 7 remote monitoring and repairing of communications systems; a broad array of Maintenance Plans; Managed Services programs and Carrier Services. For additional information please visit www.mvdcommunications.com

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

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What the iPad Means to Unified Communications

I'll be the first to admit that making any sort of broad statement about Unified Communications based on some new whizbang gadget is a stretch. The iPad isn't a game changer. It's got that amazing Apple touchscreen and some really cool UI enhancements (have you seen the page turning graphics?), but it's essentially a more human version of a laptop. Or a more computerized version of an eReader, depending on your perspective. And like the first iteration of anything, it's got a lot of holes to fill.

But what is does say to Unified Communications is that devices are 1) continuing to converge, and 2) becoming more humane. As working minds, we weren't really tethered to office desks until the typewriter became a mainstay. Then they transformed into PCs, and now we have dockable laptops and/or separate netbooks. None of these options really fit the fluidity of a body in motion, shifting from one context/environment to another.  Smartphones come close because they've evolved into mini-PCs that are ultraportable, but you still can't get much work done on them. Even browsing a webpage can be quite a challenge on small devices.

The first time I held a friend's iPhone, my immediate reaction was, "Wow, this would be perfect if it were just a little bigger." Meaning, I wouldn't need a laptop and a cellphone any longer. I wouldn't need a physical keyboard or a separate monitor. I wouldn't need a separate zipper compartment in my backpack to carry it around. Instead, it would fit into my lifestyle without me needing to adapt to it. Just a single, slim device that could do everything: phone, apps, movies, internet, e-mail, games, music, and photos.

Okay, the iPad can't do all of that...yet. Give it a year or so. Watch its competitors launch similar devices. Watch us all start to shed the extra weight of technology and move from situation to situation without checking battery life, undocking, wrapping up cables, or even thinking about a wi-fi connection. You'll be checking your morning news and e-mail over coffee, driving to work with a Bluetooth headset, stepping into an early meeting, flipping through some family photos at lunch, giving an afternoon presentation, filing a report, stepping onto an airplane and watching a movie--all without switching devices or giving a second thought to the technology required.

So what does the iPad mean to Unified Communications? It means things are still getting simpler and more portable. Devices and applications must evolve to do both effortlessly.

Chris Sullivan is the Director of Training and Documentation for AVST and also on the CallXpress Customer Advisory Council.

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Illinois State University Replaces Legacy Voicemail System with AVST's CallXpress 8

Supporting 4,500 Faculty and Staff; University Cites Reliability as Main Benefit

FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., December 2, 2009 – Communications solutions innovator Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) today announced that Illinois State University (ISU) selected CallXpress as its communications platform.  ISU and AVST struck a partnership five years ago when the University was looking to replace its outdated legacy voicemail system for a more reliable, feature-rich solution.  Today, CallXpress 8 is deployed network-wide and supports 4,500 faculty and staff.

Located in the twin city community of Bloomington-Normal, ISU has close to 21,000 students and is a residential university that emphasizes undergraduate study.  ISU has 34 academic departments in six colleges that include arts and sciences, business, education, fine arts, applied science and technology, and the Mennonite College of Nursing.  The campus includes 61 major buildings, with the communications infrastructure made up of Aastra^® E1 Digital and Cisco^® IP telephony switches, all supported by CallXpress.

When CallXpress was originally selected the University needed a communications solution that was highly reliable and offered voicemail, automated attendant, unified messaging, and message notification capabilities.  CallXpress was part of a detailed selection process and was chosen because it offered all the right features and provided additional functionality, like speech recognition, that would take ISU into the future.

Today, CallXpress supports 4,500 ISU faculty and staff members on a single system, with their mobile staff taking advantage of unified messaging.  ISU also leverages the CallXpress automated attendant, a powerful tool that manages the flow of incoming calls.  With over 26,000 calls per day, ISU utilizes advanced, schedule-based capabilities available in CallXpress to change greetings based on time of day, day of week or week of month allowing callers to get information quickly during peak calling periods and after hours.

However, the single most important CallXpress feature for ISU is high reliability. “We selected CallXpress because it offered all of the features we wanted and could easily build on future features in a cost-effective manner,” said Dan Thames, Illinois State University Voice Engineer.  “But when it comes to reliability, CallXpress can’t be beat.  We installed the system and basically ignored it.  CallXpress continues to run on its own and has allowed us to save a great deal on overhead that was required to maintain our previous system.”

ISU is supported by D&S Communications, a trusted partner and AVST reseller.  D&S is well-versed on CallXpress and has a great deal of knowledge about ISU’s network.  “CallXpress has been the right choice for ISU and is the perfect fit,” said Manny Taveira, D&S Communications National Sales Director.  “ISU needs a system that is robust yet reliable and easy to maintain and upgrade.  CallXpress delivers on all fronts.”

CallXpress has been deployed by more than 800 educational institutions to keep students, staff and faculty connected, increase their productivity and improve overall communications.  “CallXpress was designed to support even the most complex implementations with the highest reliability,” said Denny Michael, AVST’s Vice President of Marketing.  “We understand the criticality of uninterrupted communications for every educational institution, large or small.  We’re pleased to have a customer like ISU and look forward to a long relationship.”

ISU has already deployed unified messaging to a subset of its user community and plans to extend the functionality to more users.  In addition, ISU intends to roll-out CallXpress speech recognition and personal assistant features to give users hands-free speech functionality for enhanced mobility and to help make them more accessible.

CallXpress 8 delivers a powerful suite of Unified Communications applications, including advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification capabilities to help businesses become more productive.  For more information about AVST’s products visit the company’s website at www.avst.com.  

About D&S Communications
Since 1986, D&S has been a leader in offering cost effective innovations to the telecommunications industry.  D&S services customers throughout the US and is noted for having the size and depth to meet customer’s largest service requirements while also being nimble enough to provide highly customer-centric solutions.

D&S provides best of breed voice and data equipment, nationwide 24/7/365 service and repairs.  D&S products are backed by an 18-month guarantee. D&S offers a comprehensive portfolio of maintenance services for environments of all sizes and types with flexible service options. Certified technicians will address customer issues quickly through remote dial-in, on-line support, or on-site response and provide parts replacement when needed.

With D&S Communications, customers enjoy the highest level of customer satisfaction.  For service and equipment needs, contact Manny Taveira of D&S at (800) 494-7978.   For further information about D&S's products and services, please visit the company’s website at www.dscomm.com.

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.

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