In the present IT world, cloud seems to be the “secret word of the day” that gets a lot attention because people recognize how important it is to their IT strategy. There is so much talk about what it is, what the benefits are, when it will be available and who will use it. When cloud is mentioned the general reaction is: I don’t understand exactly how it works or when our enterprise will deploy it – but I want it! Tom Bittman of Gartner said, “I continue to talk with clients who understand the concept of private cloud computing, they think they know it when they see it, but they can’t quite explain it in words.”

Chris Preimesberger of eWEEK.com defined the two types of cloud; public and private. “Cloud, or utility, computing serves up computing power, data storage or applications from one data center location over a grid to thousands or millions of users on a subscription basis. This general kind of cloud — for example, services provided online by Amazon EC2, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com — is known as a “public” cloud, because any business or individual can subscribe. Private cloud computing is a different take on the mainstream version, in that smaller, cloudlike IT systems within a firewall offer similar services, but to a closed internal network. This network may include corporate or division offices…”These smaller cloudlike IT systems are owned by enterprises and are known as “Corporate Cloud.”

AVST is right there in the mix. In fact, we have hundreds of large enterprises already deployed on Private Cloud, participating in all the benefits it offers. CallXpress 8 provides them with the perfect architecture for Private Cloud. Companies are able to manage CallXpress services within a corporate firewall and network that are dedicated to their organization. With the CallXpress platform, customers have a highly available solution with Neverfail™ and survivable Call Servers within their private cloud that assures security and disaster recovery. Customers can also implement virtualization through VMware® vSphere™ 4.There are many benefits to Private Cloud including; centralizing applications within a datacenter, providing remote survivability and having peace of mind knowing your network is secure. Private Cloud is definitely a must for enterprises and companies alike.

So next time you hear “the secret word of the day” remember that the real secret is- AVST can move your company to Private Cloud today! We have hundreds of deployments and all the capabilities available to make it a smooth and easy transition. Now is the time to move to Private Cloud. Once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it.

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.

It’s not that I’m a professional beta tester and you’re not. It’s that the Outlook Social Connector plug-in utterly and irrevocably destroyed Outlook 2010 Beta on my laptop. As a long-time user of Microsoft products, I know how to repair, reboot, uninstall, reinstall, and all of the other quaint hobbies I’ve become accustomed to since working with Windows 3.1. And indeed, I had to reinstall Office 2010 Beta to get Outlook to function again. So my warning–Do Not Try This At Home–is just so you avoid that headache yourself. However, even without the plug-in actually working, I can see most of the functionality it is intended to provide, and I’m scared by this new push from Microsoft to bring social media directly to my inbox–I don’t necessarily want my professional life to intersect with my personal life.

Google has already experienced the unintended consequences of crossing public/private lines when they dropped Buzz into Gmail and made the assumption that an email contact is the same as a social contact. Ouch. But Microsoft is taking a different approach; they’re not pushing their own micro-blogging product. Known to be early and heavy users of Facebook, the company has decided to partner with the leading social media networks instead. Already LinkedIn, FaceBook, and MySpace are on the list, and I’m sure we can expect more to appear by the time Office 2010 is officially released.

LinkedIn…I get that. A professional networking site seems appropriate for business users. Virtually my entire list of LinkedIn contacts is comprised of colleagues, partners, employees, and bosses–both current and former. I’m also linked in with certain network hubs (those folks with the big and always yellow 500+ next to their name), key people in the industries I follow, and a few friends who happen to work in similar fields or have similar interests. Here’s the point: I don’t mind seeing and being seen in Outlook by these folks. I don’t mind being contacted for business purposes by them. And I don’t mind them have steady access to business-related information about me. All perfectly fine. LinkedIn has proven to be of value to my professional world on a few occasions, and I welcome that partnership.

But Facebook? That’s a different situation for me. I don’t friend business contacts on Facebook, and I try (as in, manually override the default settings each time a new iteration is released…grrrr) to restrict my photos, notes, comments, and other activities on that site just to the folks I’ve selected. Why? Because I don’t really want my professional contacts to see videos of my children, comments from my mother and siblings, photos of me in Middle School (especially that), or the status updates I post during a bout of insomnia. I tried creating a second Facebook profile–one that I would use just for work-related content–but my friends and family all started adding it as well. Fortunately for me, I never got into MySpace, so it poses no worries.

On the flipside, I try not to bring my personal life in to work too much. For example, I use Twitter strictly for a professional audience, and I don’t Tweet about what I ate for breakfast. Until I actually started using Twitter I didn’t believe people actually did that. I heard jokes about it, but I didn’t believe it was true. In fact, quite a few people do. And much more mundane and uninteresting details that flow through the twittosphere round the clock. Thoughtless updates are like those rose-in-bloom-under-a-pretty-rainbow animated GIF email signatures all of us used to endure, and hopefully they’ll also fade with time.

My Outlook inbox is already so bloated that I have to create archived PST files about once a quarter. When I travel, I have to work nights and weekends to catch up on email. When I vacation, I bring my laptop and smartphone to stay caught up. All this to say I don’ t need more unnecessary information in my inbox. Microsoft’s position on your privacy with these integrations is this: “if you choose to restrict profile access on a given network, the OSC will respect that privacy.” Prepare for the embarrassing deluge of unintended public access among your business contacts. This could get ugly. I love the idea of integrating LinkedIn with Outlook, but please, Microsoft, keep the breakfast burritos and sausage links out of my work life.

Oh, and if you still want to Try This At Home, Microsoft has posted a workaround for the Outlook Social Connector. It’s just a couple of uninstalls and reinstalls, plus one reboot. Nothing a seasoned Window’s users can’t handle.

This week at the 39^th 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

• Hardy Myers (President & CEO – AVST)

AVST User Group Meeting – Monday, April 19 at 3:45 p.m. – 5:15 p.m

• Tom Minifie, CTO of AVST, will present a roadmap for CallXpress 8
• Scott Claverie (AVST User Group Member) of California State University, Chico, will lead the forum on suggested topics from those in attendance

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.

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

• Architecture
• Scalability
• High-Availability Options
• Unified Communication (UC) Integration Capability
• Mobility Options
• Management
• Diagnostic and Remote Support
• Open Standards
• Midsize Enterprise Support

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.

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.

• Combining all of the updates that have been released for 7.91 into a single install
• Adding support for Lotus Notes 8.5
• Updating the Mitel MiTAI SDK for improved performance and stability in certain customer environments
• Updating the Dialogic software for improved performance and stability on systems with quad-core processors

Customers may upgrade to CallXpress 7.92 through December 31, 2009. After that, CallXpress 7.92 is End of Sale and will only be available to XpressCare covered customers already at 7.9 or 7.91.

Please refer to the AVST Customer Product Bulletin #128 for additional details including CallXpress 7.92 product lifecycle information.

Conscious of the current global economy and its effect on our customers, AVST has decided to take a brief pause from hosting our annual conference to focus efforts on expanding  the benefits of the AVST online community.  During this time, we have been talking to customers from around the country about options for the 2010 CallXpress End User Conference.  The feedback has been consistent – end users want to participate, but they are limited by corporate travel restrictions.

So, AVST has decided to change the format of the CallXpress End User Conference in 2010 to ensure we provide as many customers as possible with the opportunity to connect and collaborate with their peers.  Instead of requiring end users from all over the world to travel to a single location, starting in Spring 2010, AVST will be taking the show on the road and offering a series of 1-day end user seminars across the U.S. The multi-city tour will allow users to come together at regional venues to share ideas and expertise with other users, as well as provide access to AVST executives and product specialists in a small group environment.

The final cities will be announced on AVST Blog soon…stay tuned for more information!

Feature highlights:

• Tertiary System Server for CallXpress high availability solution to meet organizations’ disaster recovery initiatives
• Enhanced unified messaging for IMAP to support Google Gmail and other secure IMAP e-mail servers and services
• Lotus Notes 8.5 support for unified messaging users
• Windows 7 Professional support for end-user and administrative client applications
• AVST Developer Network featuring UCConnect, a Microsoft .NET development environment used to create custom applications. Click here to learn more or join the AVST Developer Network.  

In a recent report entitled “Critical Capabilities for Corporate Telephony,”¹ leading industry research firm Gartner identified architecture, scalability, high availability, and UC integration capability as the primary critical capabilities for building next generation corporate telephony.  These four critical capabilities are also the core framework of the CallXpress 8 platform.  To learn more about the CallXpress platform, visit the AVST website, or read CallXpress 8.1 news release.

CallXpress 8.1 is scheduled for general availability in Q1 2010 through AVST’s established reseller channels.

¹ _{Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Corporate Telephony”, by Jay Lassman and Steve Blood.September  11, 2009}