According to eWeek.com; “The whole implementation process should take anywhere from 15 to 22 months, depending on your network readiness, extent of projects and planning expertise. Unified communications and collaboration are not new technologies. Rather, there are ways to get more “bang” out of existing communications and data channels—to squeeze more value out of everyday interactions among people and to make people more operationally efficient, and improve productivity everyday!”

Through AVST’s interoperability, enterprises can gain an understanding of exactly how to get more “bang” out of their existing infrastructure. With AVST’s platform, CallXpress, organizations can be more cost-effective, scalable, flexible, secure, and reliable with the ability to implement UCC. By taking our “a la carte” approach, organizations can move at their own pace, and easily add features that are specific to their current needs, eliminating any overspending and giving them the flexibility to make changes in the future.

Is UCC in your future? Let AVST help you get there – we believe in helping customers own their own future. Contact one of our sales representatives for more information.

Mobility is definitely a hot topic in today’s IT market. Just look at some of these statistics:

• 32% of US employees are mobile workers
• There has been a 61% increase of mobile workers from 2005 to 2009 If the current trend continues, by 2016 the US mobile workers will have grown to 4.9 million
• Enterprise mobility is the biggest single trend across tech industry investment and innovation, even outpacing the cloud computing trend
• Apple has reported a record number of iPhones and iPad sales in the second quarter of 2011, powering revenues of $28.6 billion
• 47% off all adults go online remotely

One of the key factors that started this trend and continues to move it forward is the smartphone. We recently conducted a webinar titled, Getting the Most out of Your Smartphone . Here we outlined our mobile applications that are available on Blackberries, Androids and iPhones and gave step-by-step instructions on how they work. We also discussed mobility trends and where it may be headed in the future.

Check out other ways to keep up with these mobile trends and become more productive, efficient and available on the go.

At Enterprise Connect, AVST will be presenting a full lineup of sessions that address key issues for enterprises worldwide – including the variety of ways in which companies can drive mobility, transform business productivity and modernize voice communications.

In AVST’s all-new, theatre-style booth we will be presenting live sessions that will focus on five key areas:

1. Migrating Voice Infrastructure and Legacy Applications
2. Delivering Deployment Flexibility from CPE to Private Cloud and Cloud-Based UC Solutions
3. Mobilizing Workforces to Increase Business Agility
4. Utilizing Federated Presence for Real Time Communication
5. Improving Business Processes

Check out one of our newest videos and learn why AVST has the best in-class approach to UC applications; helping you cultivate a greater, more efficient level of communications in your company.

“This is an exciting time for AVST, as we are continuing to round out our industry-leading lineup of products that transition customers to Unified Communications at their own pace,” said Denny Michael, AVST Vice President of Marketing.  “Formerly VoiceCon, this annual event has consistently provided us with the opportunity for one-on-one time with our valued customers and partners to share ideas, business strategies, programs and solutions – and the tradition will continue as Enterprise Connect. We look forward to sharing with them our educational sessions that address the central themes of improving overall business communications.”

We can’t wait to see you there! Ciao for now!

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.

UCConnect is a Microsoft® .NET development framework (SDK) for CallXpress 8 used to create custom UC solutions including call processing applications, notification and alerting applications, and other customer or vertical market-specific information access and delivery applications commonly referred to as Communication-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP.

Access to UCConnect is limited to members of AVST’s new Developer Network (full program launching Q1/2010).

To join the AVST Developer Network, complete this online form and an AVST representative will contact you with full program details. For more information, please contact AVST at ucconnect@avst.com.

• Full Program Launching Q2/2010 – Register now and be the first to reap the benefits:
• FREE to join for developers, customers, resellers, technology partners and consultants
• Utilizes Microsoft .NET development tools to create custom UC applications for CallXpress 8
• Downloadable code samples
• Training – tips and tricks + online training videos
• Developer’s community to share ideas

Click here to learn more about the AVST Developer Network.

What is the Voice User Interface (VUI)?
Use easy to remember spoken commands to manage your messages, place calls to other system users, place calls directly to phone numbers and manage your mailbox settings completely hands-free to comply with government regulations when accessing your mailbox while driving.

• Easier to remember how to navigate as it uses commands that you would naturally say to perform actions
• Provides powerful features that would be difficult to use in a traditional DTMF TUI
• Most commands are the same as Seneca making it easy to transition from Seneca to the CallXpress VUI
• Utilize your 50 free UM & PA licenses to call contacts & manage your calendar from the VUI

* Speech Recognition is a licensed feature of CallXpress and is licensed on a per-resource basis.  Speech resources are pooled and allocated to ports as needed on a first-come first-served basis.

The CallXpress Archive utility lets you back up the system files and databases, any or all mailboxes, audio components associated with mailboxes, and voice and fax messages contained in the mailboxes.  Tune into the following 9 minute demonstration to learn how the new Archive utility works in CallXpress 8.

Users of CallXpress 8 now have the option to manage the profiles for SMS notification and simple unified messaging separately.  In the following 5 minute video, Pat Haney demonstrates how to easily edit the default XML message templates found on the CallXpress server to make them appropriate to your organization.

• System Server
• Neverfail® Server
• Call Server or Combination (Call Server and System Server) with an IP integration
• Small to medium sized installations with an analog or digital integration(s)

Related Links:

E-2000 R5 Server Datasheet

CallXpress 8 has been out for just a short time, and already I’m hearing rave reviews from our students and end-users about the breadth and quality of enhancements we’ve made to the product. No doubt Speech sparks the most interests in our classes, as students can’t wait to start playing around with the speech-enabled call processors and the voice recognition. We now train Speech in our Administrator and Core Technical courses, rather than separately like we did for the previous version. So if you’ve been wanting to see Speech in action and learn more about it, get signed up for one or both of those courses.

Also new to CallXpress 8 Training is our FastTrack course, which is designed to bring reseller technicians up to speed on the changes since version 7. A passing score on the accompanying exam allows students to become certified on CallXpress 8.

Please note: the FastTrack course is recommended only for reseller technicians who are already certified on version 7. A current certification is required in order to become recertified.

The course is broken out into seven lessons:

1. Introduction to CallXpress 8
2. Upgrading from 7.91 to 8
3. Understanding the new Interface
4. Working with Speech
5. Devices and Availability
6. Multi-Server Configuration
7. Upgrading from Web PhoneManager

So far, we’ve had a few hundred technicians take advantage of this course. If you haven’t enrolled yet, please download the latest training registration form from PartnerXpress and send it in!

New to CallXpress 8 Documentation we have a number of items:

• CallXpress Editable Pocket Guide – created as a request from our end-user community, this tri-fold document covers the telephone user interface menu. It’s delivered in Microsoft Word to allow you to make your own customizations and edits as you see fit.
• Voice User Interface QRC – with Speech integrated into CallXpress, this quick reference card shows the most common commands.
• Mailbox Archive Utility OLB – this online book explains how to backup and maintain mailboxes in CallXpress
• System Backup and Restore OLB – this online book covers everything you need to know to keep your CallXpress system backed up and safe.
• CallXpress Automatic Speech Recognition Guide – this guide covers everything related to Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), including concepts, licensing, requirements, installation, and troubleshooting.

And as always, we’ve updated and rewritten many of the legacy documents to address the numerous enhancements in CallXpress 8. If you have any comments, questions, or recommendations for our Training or Documentation, please send me an e-mail.

Related Links:

• CallXpress Online Technical Training Datasheet
• CallXpress End User Materials