Here’s a quick overview:

• New Messaging and Navigation
• New AVST Corporate Overview
• How AVST Resolves Key Business Challenges
• Focused Solutions – UC-Interoperability, UC-Voice, UC-Mobile, UC-Business Process

We encourage you to take a tour and tell us what you think.

According to feedback acquired, this year’s Oasis was a great success. We received 100% positive response from our follow-up customer survey. One customer said, “What you put together at this year’s conference would have been hard to improve upon; great job!”   Another commented, “You packed a lot into the conference- it worked really well.” Throughout the conference AVST heard directly from customers on what their concerns were, ways they were implementing CallXpress, some of the challenges they faced and product development suggestions for the future.

Attendees were impressed with all the capabilities CallXpress provides. During the customer panel session, users discussed the value of CallXpress feature sets and the increased efficiency and productivity it provided their companies. Features such as personal assistant, unified messaging, single number reach, speech automated attendant and customized CEBP, were revealed to be highly effective tools in their organizations’ environments. During this particular session, a customer who was sitting to my right (and feverishly taking notes) turned to me and said, “This is going to be SO good for my job! I did not realize CallXpress could do all these things.” Another user was very impressed with the interoperability of CallXpress into a Microsoft OCS/Lync environment and shared this: “We are moving to an Office 365 / Lync environment this Fall so, the Lync integration session was very interesting”.  The ability to use CallXpress 8.2 as an Intelligent Gateway for those looking to integrate Microsoft OCS / Lync with their existing telephony infrastructure was seen as a very valuable tool.

Premium XpressCare and mobility were also discussed. Premium XpressCare entitles AVST customers who qualify, to receive direct technical support from AVST. Users talked in more detail about this during the roundtable sessions, as many were planning on purchasing it for their organizations. With various, new mobile features coming soon, customers were excited about the efficiency it would provide. As our President & CEO, Hardy Myers states, “Mobility is accelerating the deployment of UC.”

Attendees reported the roundtable sessions were the most beneficial. During this time users had the opportunity to discuss one-on-one with our Product Management, Professional Services, Sales Engineering and Executive teams. By asking questions, explaining their diverse situations and voicing opinions to AVST staff, a personal collaboration was created between the customer and the company. In addition to the customer panel and roundtable sessions, the conference also provided a networking lunch and two networking dinners. With all the opportunities to come together, we heard a lot of customers asking questions; who was using what, how they could implement it and how it was effective in their companies. From Web PhoneManager to UM to Speech (and much, much more) the power of CallXpress was understood and users were infused with a renewed excitement for what they could implement once back in the office.

The ability to provide customers specific solutions to be innovative influences in their organizations is a direct result of the interaction at the Oasis conferences. It allows AVST to better understand customer needs and  focus on products that will help organizations achieve greater productivity and efficiency in the future. Our hope is that by doing so attendees will become champions in their own companies.

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.

What were the key factors that led Aims to choose CallXpress out of the many other solutions available? First, with an Octel telephone user interface emulation, CallXpress makes upgrading any system seamless for all end users. According to Aims’ Telecommunications Manager, Deb Martinez, “One of the main selling points for CallXpress was the fact that I did not have to retrain our users on a new system, and, thanks to AVST’s Octel TUI emulation, there was no retraining at all – it was an extremely smooth process for our faculty and staff. This was by far the easiest conversion I have ever made.”

Secondly, CallXpress is also a leader in speech capabilities. Aims is currently using the speech-driven directory which has reduced their inbound call traffic by 30 percent! In addition, CallXpress offers a unified messaging solution that is best-in-class. Unifying their messaging has greatly increased productivity and efficiency.

Lastly, CallXpress supports a mixed telephony environment made up of Avaya IP and digital systems across six locations. CallXpress enabled Aims to centralize administrative functions while also helping to protect against critical network failures.

AVST’s CallXpress has been deployed by more than 1,000 educational institutions. With all this experience and productivity features one could say that AVST is the “guru” of upgrading legacy voicemail systems to next generation UC solutions. So, let us help you aim your communications goals in the right direction by upgrading to CallXpress today. Read more about Aims transition to CallXpress here.

Enter…Voicemail-to-Text! Have you ever been so busy that by the end of the day you have numerous, unheard voicemails?  Would the ability to quickly scan through and read those messages be enticing? That question led James Siminoff down the path to developing Voicemail-to-Text software.

Thanks to Ditech’s PhoneTag technology, AVST offers that option. Here’s an excerpt from Phone Tag’s website: “While on a business trip in 2003, James Siminoff was out to dinner with friends: William Wachtel and his son, Jesse Wachtel. Before they could sit down, William had to sort through a 20 minute backlog of voicemails gathered during a day filled with meetings. Jesse commented to James, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just read your voicemail?’ At the time, James was working with voice recognition technologies and had a creative idea on how to build a system that would enable people to stop listening to voicemail and READ IT and with that, PhoneTag was born.”

Voicemail-to-Text is a great solution for business professionals. Imagine being able to read the content of your voicemail when listening just isn’t an option, such as when you’re in a meeting or in a noisy environment like the airport. Now, with Voicemail-to-Text, you can “visually” manage your voicemail messages easily and quickly, giving you the ability to accomplish more during your workday.

Here’s how it works. Using CallXpress notification, voice messages are forwarded to Ditech PhoneTag via SMTP. Ditech PhoneTag transcribes the voice message and converts it to text. Ditech PhoneTag sends the text along with a compressed MP3 file to the user’s e-mail address. It’s that simple- you can read your voicemail!

How will this benefit you? We want to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Read more about AVST’s partnership with Ditech Networks and Voicemail-to-Text.

DiTech PhoneTag’s mission is to bring freedom from listening to voicemail and back it with premier support and service. Every day is dedicated to supercharging customers’ communications experience.

Amerisure

As discussed in recent blog posts, AVST’s interoperability and investment protection are exactly what customers need, especially since major legacy voicemail systems are fast approaching their end of manufacturing support by this summer. Lori Wodrich, Voice Communication Analyst for Amerisure, noted that, “Amerisure differentiates itself on our exceptional customer service; in order to maintain this level of service our employees must be able to respond to anything, from anywhere and at a moment’s notice.  CallXpress has greatly increased the mobility and efficiency of our workforce through unified messaging.  Our employees rapidly embraced the unified messaging functionality in CallXpress and reported they hope to never go back to the old way of conducting business. Unified messaging has spoiled them!”

Amerisure also learned that with AVST, it’s about choice. Most messaging providers require customers to store all their messages on a voicemail or email server and if there is a change in the future, it can be expensive. With AVST you can do a combination of both and if you decide to change in the future, no additional costs will be incurred. That means a lot to our customers.

Not only does AVST excel in flexibility, it can also offer a seamless Private Cloud solution for enterprises. “CallXpress 8 provides us with the perfect private cloud architecture, including survivability,” continued Wodrich.  “The ability to have a centralized server at our main site and remote survivable Call Servers across four of our other offices provides us with a highly resilient communications platform. Because this architecture has been so successful, our intent is to migrate other locations as well.”

While we’re on the subject of upgrading infrastructures, be sure to check out our webinar next week entitled, “Beyond Voicemail- Preparing for the Future.” Learn how AVST is helping companies keep up to date today and into the future.

We encourage you to read more about Amerisure’s experience with moving to CallXpress.

How will we transform your communications?  Contact us today and find out!

Neil Butler, our Director of Sales Engineering, presented the webinar and began by explaining the mobile trends of Unified Communications. He stated that today 32% of US employees are considered mobile. Within the next 24 months UC applications for smartphones will be deployed by many organizations.

It is apparent that the enterprise workforce is becoming increasingly more mobile. The iPass 2010 Yearend Report discusses mobility and its rising number of mobile workers.

http://www3.ipass.com/about/mobile-workforce-report/

The average worker has multiple mobile devices which becomes very time consuming and tedious to manage. Consolidating communications is needed. AVST offers the perfect solution; CallXpress with its many mobile features allows you to easily manage your communications through:

• Unified Messaging
  
• Voicemail-to-Text
• Personal Assistant
• Interactive Call Screening
  
• Mobile Client
  
• Hands-free Mobile Access through a Speech Interface
  
• Single Number Reach
  
• Single Mailbox
  
• Mobile Number Protection
  
• Fixed Mobile Convergence
  

Click here to check out the video of the webinar:

Don’t get left in the dust! Look into CallXpress today!

A few weeks ago, AVST held a webinar titled “Modernize Your IT Communications”, hosted by our Director of Sales Engineering, Neil Butler.  In the webinar we discussed how AVST bridges the gap between historical IT and telecom investments and the new IP-enabled world. Their flagship product, CallXpress 8 is the leader in interoperability enabling enterprises to economically integrate and deliver UC solutions across a rapidly evolving infrastructure. CallXpress 8 delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, and personal assistant, speech, fax, and notification capabilities.

Click here to view the archived webinar

Remember, if you cannot find something you are looking for on our website, or you are not sure who to contact, you are always welcome to send questions.  Simply email us at info@avst.com, and we will have the appropriate person send you an answer.

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.

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.