In: Technology News
30 Aug 2010
In April, AVST acquired Active Voice and focus was placed on merging the two companies together. Just 125 days later, the two teams became one and released the next version of Repartee LX/LXi 11.3, XpressCare for Repartee, and huge incentives for Kinesis and Repartee customers to upgrade to CallXpress 8.1 or Repartee LX 11.3.
New Version of Repartee LX/LXi 11.3
Repartee LX bolsters AVST’s offering for the hospitality market and features over 60 property management system integrations including the company’s first IP integration with Micros Fidelio, one of the industry’s most popular property management systems. Other features include hotel guest distribution list, broadcast message capabilities, scheduled wake-up reports, and automatic updates. Plus Repartini got a new name: Repartee LXi.
Limited Time XpressCare Plus Promotion
AVST is offering huge savings for Kinesis, Repartee LX, Repartee for Windows and Repartee OS/2 customers to upgrade to CallXpress 8.1 or Repartee LX 11.3. Reap the rewards now before it’s too late, because the promotion is valid till Dec 15, 2010!
XpressCare is Here
XpressCare is AVST’s software protection and maintenance program which ensures peace of mind with AVST solutions.
It’s been an action packed 125 days.
In: Technology News
15 Jun 2010
Today marks another major milestone at AVST – the release of CallXpress 8.1, our seventh major CallXpress release since 2003. If you have a few minutes, please view the new Enterprise Resiliency movie, a short presentation on a very hot topic on how CallXpress 8.1 supports organizations requiring continuous uptime for their mission critical applications.
CallXpress 8.1 contains many new capabilities including:
CallXpress 8.l is also significant in that it represents the expansion and enhancement of the world class “platform” architecture of the CallXpress 8 solution – the foundation for all future application and interoperability innovation on the CallXpress platform – to further extend the quality and capabilities of AVST’s world class unified communications (UC) solutions.
Additional information about CallXpress 8.1 and its specifications are available here.
Regards,
Hardy Myers
President & CEO, AVST
In: Technology News
11 May 2010
AVST and Active Communications have formed a new Asia Pacific distribution agreement and are looking for new channel partners.
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies is a developer of unified communications solutions while Active Communications is a unified communications systems integrator.
Both companies have signed an Asia Pacific distribution agreement for the full range of AVST and Active Voice products.
Paul Baxter, CEO of Active Communications, said, “We are very pleased to be able to provide the structure and long standing technical expertise to allow businesses to confidently go forward with their strategic use of advanced unified communications.”
Hardy Myers, President & CEO of AVST,added, “The signing of Active Communications as our master distributor in the Asia Pacific region will enable us to extend our global reach and accelerate our position in the UC market.”
Active Communications is currently recruiting PBX resellers and IT&T integrators from around the region who are interested in augmenting their solution offerings with UC.
In: Uncategorized
19 Apr 2010
ACUTA, which stands for the Association for Information Communications Technology Professionals in Higher Education, is an international non-profit educational association serving colleges and universities. Representing over 1700 individuals at nearly 800 institutions of higher education with members ranging from small schools and community colleges to the 50 largest U.S. institutions, ACUTA’s core purpose is to support higher education institutions in achieving optimal use of communications technologies.
This week at the 39th Annual ACUTA Conference and Exhibition, Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) will be showcasing its flagship Unified Communications (UC) platform, CallXpress® 8, at booth #213 on the show floor at the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort in San Antonio, Texas, on April 18-21. AVST will focus on the most critical capabilities that enterprises should consider when looking to deploy their next generation UC solution.
“CallXpress is installed at more than 800 educational institutions and has had great success in the higher education marketplace. Each year we look forward to participating in ACUTA’s regional events as well as their annual national event, to help higher education campuses replace their outdated voicemail systems with a next-generation communications-enabled platform that supports their UC needs. Our solution is a natural fit for the ACUTA audience, making this the perfect place to co-strategize while providing attendees with a forum to share information and actively participate in the development of AVST’s future offerings,” said Denny Michael, AVST’s Vice President of Marketing.
Conference Schedule:
Corporate Presentation:
8 Critical Capabilities for Building your Campus Communications – Monday, April 19, 1:15 – 2:15 pm
AVST User Group Meeting – Monday, April 19 at 3:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m
AVST is a Corporate Affiliate of ACUTA and has been acknowledged for its support of ACUTA’s regional and national events over the last five years. For more information about AVST’s products for the higher education marketplace visit the company’s website at www.avst.com. For more information on the AVST CallXpress User Forum please visit www.avst.com/forum.
In: Uncategorized
19 Apr 2010At the ACUTA the 39th Annual Conference & Exhibition today, Hardy Myers, President & CEO of AVST, will be giving a corporate presentation titled “The 8 Critical Capabilities for Building your Campus Communications.” Mr. Myers has more than 18 years of profit and loss and financial management experience in telecom, automotive, aerospace, defense and public accounting environments. Prior to AVST he served in top executive positions at CentreCom, UMC, Safety Components IValentec, and Price Waterhouse.
The presentation is expected to identify and weigh the critical capabilities in building a campus communications infrastructure. Mr. Myers will identify how CallXpress 8 meets each of these essential requirements
by Chris Sullivan
With every new technology, we see a honeymoon phase followed by the reality check. Think back to the dot-com boom of the late nineties and the subsequent bust when everyone was building a web presence and a web business because, well, it was the web. Web 1.0. The information web. Machines talking to people. We were madly in love with it. These new businesses had to be valuable because they were on the web. Some were; many weren’t. It was tautological. Web = Web Presence = Web Business. But where was the value? Once reality set in, we saw the difference: Amazon.com flourished; Pets.com flopped.
Now we’re seeing a similar trend in Web 2.0. The collaborative web. People talking to people. Social media is the big buzz, and we’re told that we have to be involved in order to survive. Get your company on Twitter, and start tweeting to your customers. Create a presence on Facebook and build a ‘fan’ base. Put your company profile on LinkedIn. Use tools that allow you to post to all three simultaneously because you can’t miss out on this important development. Get with the new media or you’ll perish. Setup a company wiki, crowd source your product, get everyone on IM.
To be sure, there is much to be gained through social media, both in the business realm and for us personally. To find it, I always ask where’s the value? Are you really connecting with your customers and employees in a meaningful way when you tweet a couple of sentences about some new announcement? Are you building a lasting relationship there? Is your Facebook page just FYI, or are you using it as an effective tool with some larger game in mind? This honeymoon will soon end, and we’ll all realize that being social is not nearly as important as being meaningfully social.
And already the next trend is starting to catch on–Web 3.0. The real-time web. Machines talking to machines. Our screens are starting to pop constantly with new information and ideas as web services feed live data to all sorts of interconnected pages and APIs. We are becoming our own news desk, pouring over raw information and trying to get a sense of events as they unfold. I recently used Google’s live Twitter results feed to monitor a local election, and I found out the winners well before any news service announced them. We’re seeing less mitigation, less analysis, more action, more reaction. Businesses certainly have already taken advantage of web services in order to gain the real-time edge. And on the social side, TweetDeck does a great job of aggregating live updates and posts—so much so that it feels overwhelming at times. Most of us already have some sort of an internet connection with us at all times, and now mobile broadband is arriving to the masses who can’t afford an iPhone.
I have to say, I’ve been ogling Google’s Nexus One ‘Web Phone,’ I can’t wait to use an iPad, the Windows and Android tablets are on their way, and the preview videos of Microsoft’s Courier leave me drooling. I’m already dreaming about the honeymoon.
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.
In: Did You Know?
10 Feb 2010Replaces 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 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, 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.
In: Voices
28 Jan 2010I’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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