AVST Blog » Customer Advocates

Voice and Data Convergence – I’m talking about people…

Linda Benenato — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 00:21:37 +0000

My previous employer was a large health maintenance organization…so large that the information technology staff alone was the size of a medium sized business. Several years ago “voice and data convergence” was all we heard about. It was the subject of every industry publication, enterprise news report, even webinars. In fact if you “Google” the phrase you will get hundreds of thousands of results to choose from. We were inundated with talk about convergence and naturally, like all companies, we began to go down that path. But just as in every company, this had a profound effect on the staff. Although we had merged the telephony organization with the IT organization a few years prior, the people still had their separate functions and even management. It was almost like we spoke different languages.

Over the past few years the telephony experts had to learn all about the IP world, and do it quickly. It was quite challenging to transition from all that we knew about numbering plans, cable plant, least cost routing to domain names, IP addressing, subnets, internet protocols and data marking and compression. And for some of us at least, it was, how do I say this delicately, not in the early stages of our careers…speaking for myself! At first it was overwhelming…where do I begin? I think that the majority made the transition quite well and have now become IP-Telephony experts. It has been proven that our telephony expertise has truly been an asset as we moved into the world of voice over IP. Those who learned had a sort of “resistance is futile” attitude and kept an open mind to learning all the network concepts and “lingo.”

I was thinking about this the other day while I was driving and I wonder what it has been like at your company. I am interested in your thoughts and experiences with this as it has truly changed our world forever. Don’t you think?

Linda Benenato, PMP

AVST Community Success Director
info@avst.com
www.avst.com

University of New Mexico Selects CallXpress

Blog Administrator — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:13:39 +0000

University of New Mexico is the state’s largest university, and when it became apparent that its current voicemail system was performing unreliably, a decision regarding a replacement needed to be made quickly.

After careful consideration and undisputed positive feedback from other universities and corporate references, UNM opted to deploy CallXpress over other systems.

“Every single organization that we talked to that owned a CallXpress system noted that it was easy to install, extremely stable, and bottom line – it worked,” commented UNM Associate Director Mark Reynolds. “UNM’s diverse networking environment, which supports many high-volume, critical-path departments, requires a communications infrastructure that works reliably from day one and needs no babysitting – CallXpress fits the bill on all accounts."

Click on the following link to read more about UNM’s successful deployment of CallXpress.

What’s Your Story!

Blog Administrator — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:08:14 +0000

The mission of the Customer Advocate Program is to develop and sustain customer relationships to showcase how AVST solutions are used by businesses of all sizes to meet their unified communications needs. The fundamental principles behind the program are integrity and mutual respect. Participation in the program can include these benefits:

Access to product teams
Insights into product strategy and roadmaps
Input into technology design and functionality
Early adopter and beta program opportunities
Visibility and recognition for your innovation

There are several opportunities for you to highlight your achievements and to share your innovation with your peers. As an AVST Customer Advocate you can chose to:

Validate your AVST successes via direct interactions with your peers
Showcase your unified communications solutions with a case study
Act as media and industry analyst reference to illustrate your technology leadership
Present your use and commitment of our products at conferences and events
Use your company name and logo as a general reference in AVST marketing materials
Publish a quote on the AVST website about your experiences with CallXpress, the User Group, or AVST Online Community

Tell us your story of how CallXpress has been deployed in your organization, today!

Complete the online Customer Advocate Program Questionnaire.

City of Phoenix Case Study

Blog Administrator — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:35:37 +0000

The City of Phoenix, Arizona’s capital city, is the fifth largest city in the nation with over 1.5 million residents. With more than 40 departments and functions throughout the city including the Police Department, City Hall, the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and the Parks and Recreation Department, the City of Phoenix has over 14,000 employees who depend upon a reliable, easy to use voice mail system.

“We realized early on that in order to meet the needs of our 14,000 users today, we needed to be able to deploy a robust, highly scalable and cost-effective solution in a short period of time and with minimal disruption to our current users who are scattered across more than 40 city departments and functions," said Linda Henderson, IT Supervisor for the City of Phoenix.

Read City of Phoenix Case Study Online

After deploying their system earlier in the year, Linda Henderson attended the 1st Annual CallXpress End User Conference and had this to say:

"I felt the time was VERY WELL spent. I learned a lot at the conference and found it extremely beneficial."

Lane Council of Governments Case Study

Blog Administrator — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:29:02 +0000

Lane Council of Governments (LCOG) is a voluntary association of local governments in Lane County, Oregon. Since its inception in 1945, the agency has partcipated in a wide variety of projects and programs for local governments. Today, LCOG serves Lane County, the 12 cities within the county, as well as education, public utilities and other special districts.

One of the Council’s recent charters has been to assist in coordinating a streamlined and reliable voice mail and call processing system for the region’s eight core agencies including the City of Springfield, City of Corvallis, Eugene 4J Schools, the City of Eugene and Lane County. A key priority for the LCOG has been to replace its legacy voice messaging systems with a next generation communications platform that will support the needs of the organizations and its 6,000+ users.

Read Lane Council of Governments Case Study Online