Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

Slide 1 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

Good morning or good afternoon. Welcome and thank you for joining us for Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI. I'm Ann Rude, marketing manager here at AVST. We're here to assist decision makers like yourself in your migration from voicemail to unified communications and today we'll be outlining your 10 critical considerations to ensure your migration from your legacy solution to your next generation UC solution delivers a strong return on investment. Our webinar this morning is presented by Niel Butler, AVST director of Sales Engineering, and after the presentation we'll leave time for Q and A although you may type in your question anytime in the question page during the presentation. So with that I'll go ahead and turn it over to Niel.

Thank you Ann. Good afternoon or morning everyone depending on where you happen to be. This is actually a very interesting subject for us as part of looking at who our customers are and talking to our customers both before a sale and after a sale. It's really become apparent that there are quite a few challenges when you look at taking your existing infrastructure, your existing applications and planning on how you're going to move ahead to unified communications. Because of the very nature of unified communications and the fact that interoperability is such a key part, it's really not a decision you can break down very easily into small pieces and buy one segment at a time without quite a bit of consideration in terms of what you're doing when you pick these particular silos of applications. So what we're going to look at today is not just why we think we're a good choice in unified communications but we have a list of 10 things (in general) as you're evaluating any unified communication solution, you should be thinking about both in the actual solution you're looking at the time, but also in how that affects where you're going to go in the future. Obviously, we'll use our own application for examples and we're hoping to prejudice you towards our solution but I think you could really take these 10 steps, write them down, and use them as a guideline as you look at moving forward from pretty much a silo based structure where all your communication tools are fairly separate into one (sometime in the future) where they're not separate. It takes a lot of research to do this and allot of work and so what we like to do is give you some tools to help you on that.

Slide 2 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

If you look at kind of the UC market growth cycle, it's actually not as new as people think it is, I suppose, there has been some tying together of key communication applications for quite a while in the call center market with the voicemail. Lots of you already have some portion of your infrastructure in place that's either UC enabled already or certainly capable of going in that direction. Probably the first piece of big business that got done in the UC market was voicemail. And the voicemail pieces basically integrated with the telephone pieces and from there, probably the actual application that you could first call a highly deployed UC application was unified messaging. With unified messaging you took your telephone system and your voicemail that were already tied together and you added into that mix a connection to your groupware. And what that did was exactly what the goal of UC is. It lets you have more productivity for your employees, it gave them more tools, it made them more responsive to their messages and communication. Many of you are sort of in that mode right now of just getting ready to evaluate unified messaging. Or you've done unified messaging and you're ready to expand it to look at some of the new speech enabled interfaces, the find me/ follow me, the personal assistant, pieces like that. If you've already moved to a UC platform in terms of unified messaging, then you've made that first decision and that first decision controls a lot about what you can do going forward. One of the key pieces as you look at sourcing any solution for unified communication, besides the obvious piece of what the functionality is and what it does for you, is how open is it? How is it going to interoperate with your other applications? Not only the ones you have today but the other pieces you're looking at adding down in the future. So the personal productivity piece, as you make that decision, all those rules and steps apply there as well. And from there you're going to move into further communications. You're going to look at pulling in some of your CRM programs, some of your customer service programs; you're going to look at both a horizontal look at tying communications together for your employees and some of your key customers and a vertical look where you're going to want to take specific programs that you have and enable the unified communications functionality to let your users use it more effectively in more locations more safely with a speech interface. So that growth cycle, it started for most of you. The fact that you're at this webinar means you're at the very least evaluating it but probably most of you are a step or two down that path. One of the real challenges here is figuring out which piece next. How do you move forward? If everybody had an unlimited budget you could certainly take everything out, pick everything you wanted new and put unified communications in place. But very few of us have the ability to waste money and take out perfectly good systems. But at the same time we have systems that have to be replaced. So this whole cycle is going to be one of picking and choosing of pieces and making sure when you pick each individual component you don't lock yourself into something where you later regret the fact that you only have a direction you can go in.

Slide 3 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

If we look at going from voicemail to full unified communications, there is allot involved there. The goals are actually pretty straight forward, particularly at least for that first step of unified messaging, but how you get there is a little more complex. As well as evaluating the productivity and the new features that a new solution gives you, you also have to keep in mind it has to fit it in your organization. So high availability solutions which may be a key component of what your doing have to be considered as you look at each component. The whole business continuity piece seems to be more important than ever and the movement of most of these systems into your data network means there's a whole new range of requirements that maybe some of the unified communications vendors haven't really caught on with. For those of you that use multiple sites, obviously centralization, consolidation, that lowering of that ongoing total cost of ownership's a very important piece. And once again, we're going to look at kind of the pieces to look at as you source each component for that. And mobility. Mobility is certainly getting allot of market presence right now and everyone has their slightly different view of what mobility is. It's interesting; mobility is one of the hardest ones to stay on top off. I know that if your employees are like our employees and there is a new popular device every six months that they absolutely have to have and there are these new standards and mobile devise operating systems, and new features for what mobile devices can access. And that's going to be a key piece. As you evaluate every piece in a US infrastructure, the mobility component is going to be one of the most complex ones to look at. But obviously the goal here is to get from where you are today to something that's better and along the way you're going to be replacing some of your existing infrastructure or adding to it. One of the goals we'll be looking at today is maximizing the value of what you already have. There's plenty of vendors that say the way to get to UC is to rip and replace everything. You take out everything you have, you put in everything new under one product umbrella, and there you are. And even if you look at those product umbrellas is they really not complete yet. But the most important piece about that story is there's probably not a need to rip everything out right now. You probably have plenty of equipment and solutions that can last for years still. Don't get concerned that you can't have the UC functions you want today without replacing everything. Even market analysts like Gartner say the best way to do this is a point by point comparison and do a best in breed selection for everyone as long as at the same time you make sure the solutions you pick will be interoperable with the major players that you might be wanting to source the other solutions from.

Slide 4 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

What were going to do here is break this down into 10 quick steps. Just a really easy list. And the list is sort of an auxiliary list. Obviously, as you sit down to source, let's say its unified messaging or call center application, you're already going to be very familiar with what you're looking for in terms of the kind of functionality your seeing out there and you know how to evaluate that from the various vendors. What this list is it adds to that some things you should be careful about that you may not think about that are different in a UC solution than if it were an actual silo you were going to replace with just a point solution.

Slide 5 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

So step 1: maximize the value from your existing investment. A lot of people five years ago were talking about moving to IP telephony as soon as they could, but the economy doing what it did caused them to back step and say, "that's deficiently a goal for us. We're evaluating it. Were maybe even making sure that any new enterprises that get open take advantage of that technology and places where it's very important we're consolidating and doing that. But, one of the things to keep in mind for most of the UC solutions that you'll look at is there is no need to first rip out your entire telephony infrastructure and move to IP. Almost all of these products that everyone offers will work just as well in their TDM environment. Now there may be a few little features in a feature packet you look that requires something new in the PBX world but almost all the functionality that is really important and gives you enhanced productivity will work in a TDM environment, a Centrex environment, your new IP environment; Don't be lowed into the sense that "I have to take everything out in order to get this replaced". Replacing your entire infrastructure not only is expensive but it's going to be extremely disruptive to your business which is just another level of expense that you would incur.

Slide 6 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

The second piece to look at, if you're replacing something and you're trying to evaluate what it costs you, keep in mind there is a hidden layer of costs which are the training and ongoing maintenance cost. If, I use a voicemail as an example here because it's the one people tend to be facing first, you have 100 employees or 10 thousand employees, that whole thought of not only spend the money and taking the organizational time to set up a training to teach people to reuse it, the first week of using a new solution like that productivity goes down, messages get lost. So one of the goals you should have as you go through and evaluate these solutions that you find the one that will be the least disruptive in your business. The way you do that with a voicemail is fairly straightforward. Hopefully you can find one that emulates (or very closely emulates) the interface that you have now. And that can reduce or completely eliminate training. And that not only sets you up for minimum impact as it goes in but you also want to make sure going forward that you're not locked in to just that one interface. Now some of you might have a single location, maybe you have an old octal system you want to replace it and have the octal interface and that seems fine. Some of you have multiple sites. You're involved in current acquisitions. You're going to have new employees at the CXO level who are going to come in and not like the current interface that they have. So it's always a good idea that the system you purchase actually doesn't just emulate the one interface but it's flexible and can do multiple interfaces in case you add new systems on… maybe even one that can do. Maybe even one that can drop a user by user choice. So that ability to minimize the training cost upfront is a little easy to see but keep in mind down the road you're going, depending on your business, have the same kind of issues as you roll more companies into your business.

Slide 7 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

This piece is probably the most obvious ones in that you're going to be looking at the new features (once again I'll use voicemail) you're going to go from a transitional voicemail into a unified messaging and your completely competent at going out there and evaluating how unified messaging works and that will be something that wont slip by you because it is a key piece of the process. One of the things that may slip by you is that next generation feature set sometimes is only available for manufactures and their new generational product and their new generational product doesn't always support the legacy features. We've talked to so many customers that told us that we bought this new system and we went in the first week and found a half dozen applications running on our old voicemail that we weren't even really aware of and the new system couldn't even do those things. Make sure you identify everything critical that's happening on that system and that whatever new system you choose, as well as getting the new fancy features, supports the existing features as well.

Slide 8 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

If you're looking at unified messaging or anything that connects with your groupware or email environment, there is a really strong need here for flexibility. The obvious first level piece is make sure the products you're going to look at or evaluate work with your email system. And whether you're using exchange or notes or send mail or GroupWise and of those this certainly holds true. Once again, keep in mind that down the road your organizations is going to grow through acquisitions, or its going to be in a position where it's going to perhaps change from one type of groupware system to another. Make sure you're not buying a system that's not locked in completely too just one groupware package. And there are a number of solutions out there that basically are implemented by taking advantage of some of the poor pieces of exchange, notes, groupWise. Not that you wouldn't get your value of those, but if you later decide to change something you'd probably find that they'd have to be replaced because they're not flexible. So that whole interoperability piece comes into play when you look at UC solutions and your email and your groupware environment. Even going with someone on, let's say an exchange base and you suddenly find out that you're ready to go into exchange 2010 but your solutions that you've tied in tightly aren't because they're tied so tightly to one version. Now you're sitting there waiting to do the upgrade you want to do until that other vendor does an upgrade on their product. Even something as little as that is something you want to evaluate before you lock yourself into something that's tied that closely to just one environment.

Slide 9 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

If it's unified messaging you're looking at, this is an interesting solution. For one it's been out there the longest, probably in the UC world (maybe because it's been out there the longest), it's become fairly complex. When you talk to UC vendors they'll talk to you about the five C's of unified messaging and that's compliance, confidentiality, configuration, capability, and cost. Some of those are obvious others not so obvious. The thing about unified messaging is one of the first points where you're going to start talking about putting your voice infrastructure and the messaging piece of it not only on your network but into an environment where regulations have been playing havoc for the last 10 years. So compliance is one of those issues where depending on your industry, depending on the size of the company, depending on your structure, there may be laws in place that deal with how you deal with electronic communication. Whether it's a Sarbanes–Oxley issue, a HIPAA issue for health industries, FERPA for education; any number of these that quite closely govern how you have to handle the kind of messages they cover. It's not really clear how they cover voicemail. Voicemail may be an e-document when it's stored on your email sever, it may not. No one has really figured that out exactly.

But as far as the compliance issues and confidentiality issues, far beyond just the functionality available with unified messaging, you need to make sure you understand how those work. The configuration is the one you really kind of really want to evaluate. Down below it shows there are four types of unified messaging. These are actually not feature sets, these are architectures. The architectures are really all about where the messages are stored. They can be stored on the voicemail system; they can be moved to and stored on the email system, they can be on the voicemail system but accessed from an email client, they can be on the voicemail system and be accessed y a web client, copies can be forwarded; you have some architectural choices there. The configuration that your system offers determines how well you're going to do in the compliance and confidentiality areas. Yes, capability is certainly a feature but honestly if you look at most major vendors unified messaging product, they're all within 10% of having the same functionality. Unified messaging is the best cooked UC application because it's been out there since the early 90's.But, the configuration area is still an area you can trip in. You want to make sure you're not buying a system that's limited to one type of architecture, such as a system where you have to store your messages in your email. Or a system where you can't actually store them in your email. Later on if compliance dictates that you have to archive them all, it's going to be a lot more convenient to put them together. So make sure you look not only at the cost and feature set (very important) but the flexibility of the deployment types so that you don't trip over those compliance issues. .

Slide 10 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

The whole centralization and consolidation area is one that has been so very active in the lst few years. Fifteen years ago you might have had 8 sites and you're choices were really to have 8 phone systems, 8 voicemail, and probably about that time have 8 email systems, or maybe your just about ready to tie your emails together. So, the whole concept of reducing costs by centralizing it all really wasn't something that came up. Now however, the whole implementation of the digital network has really made the world a different place and a smaller place. The fact that you have two locations they're that are 500 miles apart doesn't really mean anything anymore in terms of the ability for you to tie things together. So there is a big drive to centralize to reduce administration costs, the training cost, and add a certain level of extra functionality to the systems. So make sure you understand not only your current architecture but where you're headed as you source this UC solution. You need something flexible unless you're actually ready to say, "take my distributed 8 site environment, tear it all out and lets go to one centralized environment through IP and then I can have one centralized voicemail". Unless you're actually ready to do that, you'll probably need to be doing a phased approach which means you're going to start out with some distributed systems, but you don't want to be limited. You want to be able to roll those systems together when the time comes. So make sure you understand the product centralization architecture. How you can go from where you would have to start today (maybe multiple systems) to maybe eventually a single, centralized environment. Don't lock yourself in or lock yourself out of choices by picking your component today and when you get ready to tie it all together you have problems. You might not even have picked you IP solution of choice so you have to be very careful that flexibility remains for you to move in whichever direction is correct for you but you still want to be able to use whatever you're buying today.

Slide 11 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

Licensing is always interesting to look at it certainly has to do with the cost of the system, it's one of the more visible pieces, and I think the trick here is fairly simple you certainly are going to look at the licensing for what you're going to buy today. You're going to compare 8 vendors, you're going to compare 8 prices, and you're going to have a pretty good understanding of where they all stand. But keep in mind, if you're planning on moving forward, if you're planning on tying these systems together in a UC environment, if you're planning on replacing some of your infrastructure pieces, if you're planning on adding more functionality down the road, make sure you understand the licensing model and not only what the vendor says it costs today but what does it cost next year because there are plenty of vendors who aren't really happy with how they licensed some of their advanced staff that will basically sell you the story, "oh we have all that". What you should do is let's get a basic system in and get you comfortable and then once you're settled and we haven't really had much disruption in your environment, then we'll look at adding these down the road, which is not a bad philosophy at all as long as they're willing to tell you what it cost you to add them down the road. Licensing is a key area for us vendors in terms of making sure we make the money we need to make so you just need to make sure they're not playing the shell game with you in moving costs out for things maybe you aren't looking at today but you might be wanting to look at in the future.

Slide 12 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

Step 8 is kind of what it's all about. The whole user productivity piece. This is why you're buying most of these applications. The combination of better productivity and lower cost is really what UC is all about. So now we have to look at what are we giving the users and what are we going to give them first and what can they really use, what is really valuable to them. And there is a very wide range when you look at user productivity; you're talking about productivity at their desk, productivity away from their desk, productivity when they're on the network, productivity when they're not on the network and the goal here, of course, is to try to give them everything we need. And that's a very complex list of things to fill out. If we look at some of the technologies that are available out there today, the mobile device is certainly a key piece. You certainly have a group of people that work in an office. They work from 9 to 5, sit at a desk, log in, have all their programs and they're very good, they triage their email, and they stay right on top of it. But you probably also have some people that don't do that all the time and those tend to be some fairly important people: your revenue generators, your management staff. And they get away from their desk and you need to make sure what they do away from their desk can be at least as productive as possible at least as close to what they do at their desk which means what mobility needs to do is extend the common tools from the desktop. Now everyone has a mobile phone so we've probably extended voicemail fairly reliably. And if you have one of the newer mobile phones you've probably extended email. So you know the blackberry world out there has been pretty productive handling email just as a separate silo item for a number of years. But if you really look at what you do at your desk, you're really already unified at your desk pretty well in terms of your working habits, you know, you climb in the morning there, you run your email, you look through, you do a triage of your messages, you find an important message, you open it, you read it, you realize you have to talk to a coworker so you call them, maybe a meeting has to be set up so you can resolve this for a customer, then you move on to that next message. And that knowledge worker group; that's how we're productive at our desk. So as you're evaluating those mobile solutions, you should be looking at something that extends the desktop. Not just a point solution but a virtual desktop. Let's give our mobile users not only the tools that they need to access the components but let's let them work in that same way as possible. So if you look at a mobile worker who has a mobile phone and they have their email on it and they have a speech interface into their platform so they can read their messages over the phone, they can read them over their device, they can triage messages, maybe they can get in over the phone and create new appointments in their calendar, maybe they have a single number aspect where customers call a number and then wherever they are they empower their device to find them (or maybe not to find them depending on what they are doing and how busy they are). That single number/ single mailbox piece is something that's well worth evaluating. You should end up with a solution where no matter how a customer calls an employee, those messages end up in one mailbox. You might not want to store them all in one place but from a user's point of view, if they can go to one place and evaluate what their current message load is, they are going to be more productive and more responsive. That's one of the goals you really want to evaluate as you start tying these systems together.

Slide 13 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

It's probably true that most of us are at the stage of looking at unified communications at a very horizontal level primarily for users. These first things we're looking at tend to be more user focused and the reason is people who are making them need to make them for a very vide audience when they get started. So we have these applications that tend to work anywhere. That's good but there is a next level coming right behind them on productivity features that are not focused just on the user but focused on processes. They're still fairly generic; although the specific ones are falling right behind, built things like a really good notification system that ties in not only to your voicemail and your email but notifies you when you get certain kinds of records in your CRM package or when customer orders, you know, lock up in the process. That whole bit about once again, if you were at your desk a guy would stick his head in your office and say, "hey the big Johnson and Johnson order didn't go through". That's not happening if you're mobile so all these business processes can be automated. Now the trick about automating business processes is the flexibility of the system to do it. So you're looking for something to be tuned to your environment to do things like information delivery, notification deliver, perhaps intelligent call routing that based on what's going on in your business today calls go to one person or the other or they go to your voicemail directly or they track you down directly. So, that's that next level. That's what's coming down and people are starting to talk to you about now. And what follows that I think will be the focused point solution so let's make sure we have a solution that ties into your CRM package (your sales reporting package, whatever it is you have).

Slide 14 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

And this last piece for UC, I'm not too worried that anyone is going to miss this one because the IT staff will make sure this is covered, I think, in most cases. And it's a very important one. It's interesting coming from a company that was primarily a voicemail company for years and years and as we moved into the network through unified messaging and we started doing more and more in the data world and the offshoot was the data people, when we told them voicemail is highly reliable, telephony infrastructure, five 9's of reliability (the story we've always told), they just sort of looked at us with a blank look and said "in our environment, things break". And that's certainly true. The basic openness of a network that makes it so valuable also makes it more vulnerable than a telephony infrastructure. So the truth is a voicemail that sat for 20 years in a box that never failed and the switch room next to the switch with no connection to anything except the phone system was far less vulnerable than a unified communications systems that's handling voice components but it's sitting on the local area network, its running operating systems that are well known to the public. Definitely we have moved from the area of high reliability, which we still important and we still do, to the area of high availability which means if a component does break, what do you do? If you lose a main site, what do you do? How do you get that business continuity to work through for these applications? Now they're all tired together so it's much more important. If part of your email store is part of your voicemail store because they're tied together, you need to make sure that if your spending the time and money to make sure your email environment is robust with clustering and fail-over servers, you probably want to be able parallel that on the voice side of your business. So you're looking for a product that can match what your company is doing for high availability. It may be very simple. Maybe a simple 2 server fail over kind of solution in one location. Maybe more complex. It may include multiple sites. It may include a disaster recovery program. It says, "If I lose my main site entirely, for business continuity reasons, I still have to take phone calls, I still need everything working". So just make sure as you look at a UC solution, you go through and match what you're looking at buying to what your architecture is for your entire high availability solution for everything on your network. And, like I said when I started this point, I'm fairly comfortable that your IT people are going to be right there because this is a key piece for everything they're looking at right now.

Slide 15 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

So, pretty easy 10 step process. You'll going to have access to this presentation so you'll have the list if you want to look at it. Of course the proof really is how well does that work? If you look at our history, because this is certainly a story we've been telling for years, we pride ourselves on our flexibility and interoperability as the largest independent provider of the kind of solutions we do. We really understand that need to connect to multiple things and not limit our customers to we only work in this one environment.

Slide 16 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

So if you go to the customers that we've dealt with, you're going to find allot of people out there using our product. 1985 was our first install years and years and years ago. There are over 10 million users on the CallXpress system in our various versions of the product and the O.E.M versions of the product. Plenty of people out there have had our assistance for 20 years… 10 years. We've been out here doing this for a long time. And when the time comes for you to evaluate us as a vendor, what we're going to do is put you in touch with customers. We're going to find customers that match your basic set up of your environment and have done what you're looking at doing. So whether you're concerned about a huge cut over and the impact and we send you in one direction. Or you've got an environment that's very volatile, you've got some TDM switches, you're halfway through migrating to an IP product, you've done an acquisition, you have two other IP products; we're going to be able to find people that have that environment so they can talk about how they made their decision and what they experienced. The reference piece is extremely important in UC communications. It's very easy for a vendor to say "h yes I can do that and I can do that in your environment". It's a little harder for other vendors to say here are 10 references who have done it the same way. So make sure you take the time and trouble to get your vendors to provide you with the right kind of references. A lot of these guys will take you to a really fancy demo center and they'll show you all these apps and everything's working fantastic on a big high definition screen. Talk to the people that did it out there in the real world and see what they experienced. And what we'll do in that case is put you in touch with the right people to talk about those kinds of implementations and how they went whether they went really smoothly, whether they had bumps; all that stuff you really want to know. The goal, of course, when you're done is to be comfortable that you not only added productivity but you saved some money. For a lot of years, the whole concept in business is you don't spend any money right now unless you're pretty sure you're going to make more than that back. We're all running on constrained budgets. So the goal is to talk to some of those references and have them show you, not just tell you, but show you how they did this. And we have references that will say here is what our maintenance costs were on our legacy equipment, here's what we paid on our new equipment, here's the around of savings we had spread over whatever years it is and then at the same time you compare how well did it go, what did you get, and how well are your users actually using those systems. That's a key piece in the evaluation process is make sure you talked to customers who have done what you're going to do and they can tell you why it worked for them. And I think that makes the kind of decisions you have to make a lot easier.

Slide 17 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

The good thing about working at the company I work at is we've been doing one thing extremely well for a long time. Like I said we're the last independent players in our market space and if you talk to employees here at AVST, the average time with the company is over 15 years which you're not going to find anywhere else. And you're going to find that by focusing on one solution, what we've been able to do is build a leading edge product that's out in the market, it does its job, and it's highly reliable. We've been working for years on not only making sure it does what it's supposed to do but that it does it every single day. We don't sell directly; all we do is build products. We go out through a network of value added resellers and there are a couple hundred of them floating around there in the 50 countries that we sell in and we have another set of arrangements in 28 other countries. What we do is focus on making the product and that focus gives us two things. A highly reliable product but it also puts us in the market a little early than everyone else is with these solutions because we're not sharing programming resources with 5 other applications, we have people that focus just on the pieces we do. 10 million users out there. Some of the system has been out there for over 20 years and we can put you in touch with customers who have had the product for that long. We were very lucky when we started the very first version of our product ran on an open system. We were able to use open industry standard hardware which means we didn't have to worry about bending metal and putting chips in cards. What we did was focus on building solutions. And by using the kind of product and operating systems and hardware that's around and used by lots of companies (millions of dollars of research that those larger companies put in) we get to leverage for the reliability of our product.

Slide 18 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

We're actually a small company in terms of looking at the market. If you look at the names of the people out there that we are competing with, we're probably the least recognizable name I would guess. That being said, if you talk to people that know this industry we are extremely well thought of in terms of by the industry analysts, the larger customers, all those people. If you talk to Gartner or Frost and Sullivan (whichever report you want to look at) you'll find the three big names in the upper right quadrant along with us. And once again, the way we've done that is by focusing, narrowing our focus down to one single solution and taking that solution and just keeping at it year after year after year. We were the first to have unified messaging; we were the first to have a fax solution built into our product, we were the first and actually still the only one to have a full interactive voice response component that runs on our product. So if you decide you want to have a point solution that just talks to your CRM in a particular way, building those kinds of applications is easy to do as well.

Slide 19 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

The whole reason why we're still around is the architecture that our initiation product architect gave it. And, being data people, they basically said we want to build a multi application server and to do this, what we need to do is isolate the world from the critical application. So everything we do when we talk outside our platform is non-direct and goes through an interoperability layer. So if I'm doing unified messaging and I need to talk to the email system, I'm doing it with a connector and that means if the email changes I don't have to rewrite our code. If we change a version of our product, I don't have to retest against the email. That interoperability layer gives us a level of flexibility and it also lets us do things like connect to 10 different email systems or 5 versions of exchange or 2 exchange servers in different domains. All the things that other people struggle with because of this application architecture get very, very easy. This is true as we talk to business applications and as we look at tying into that new presence engine. That interoperability layer gives us a tremendous advantage and it's been in our product since the very beginning.

Slide 20 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

We're not the only one that sings the interoperability story. Gartner came out last year and said particularly as you look at tying these communications together. As you look at replacing one silo today with something that even if today is not going to be part of your unified communication strategy. Perhaps you're replacing a legacy voicemail and you really want today is like for like. You've got that voicemail system sitting there that's approaching end of life you need to replace it Make sure you still consider the fact that long before the life span of that new system is over; you are going to want to connect it. So you really need to be looking at the interoperability capabilities of all these solutions even if it's only as a future concern. If we look at kind of our history and we started in the industry building voicemail, we took that to a multi application server, we added fax, we added call processing, we added a notification engine, we added interactive voice response, we added unified messaging, we added personal assistant, we layered speech so that the new speech interface can gain access to all the functionality, we have programming tools; we've definitely taken our system and made it not only interoperable but made it so that most of what you want in your environment is a core part of the solution that's been in it for years and tested. But we also given you the ability to expand out and change which is certainly going to be a key part of what you'll have to face in the next few years.

Slide 21 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

This is always my favorite slide. I'm ready for questions.

How many PBX's are supported with an AVST system?.

Well there are a couple of layers to that. A single AVST system can connect 10 different types of PBX's. Now types are not the limit, really. So I can have 5 Avaya PBX's connected on a CallXpress (that's one), I can have 3 Cisco clusters connected (that's 2), ect. all the way up the line. So there really functionally isn't much of a limitation. We have yet to have a customer that has more PBXs in their environment than we can connect to.

Ok good. And then the next question: is speech access licensed with unified messaging?.

Once again that licensing story is always an interesting one and let me explain how we do it. First of all, voicemail users are not licensed. So if you buy a system and put 12 ports on it, you can put as many mailboxes on it as are going to be functional. Obviously you'll reach a point where you have more mailboxes than will allow the callers to get in so the ports and mailboxes are sort of tied together but we don't license them. We do license unified messaging and there's are a number of reasons for that some having to do with cross licensing and other things but the bottom line is, if you put a system in you would buy licenses for as many users as you had. So let's say you buy 2,000 UM licenses on your system. Now the speech piece is licensed per session. So if you have a 48 port system you'd probably want 48 simultaneous sessions of speech. And once you buy those speech licenses, users automatically get UM. Any user now can have a speech or a DTMF interface. There is no additional charge to give a user a speech interface once you put the speech resources on the system. Now there is one license on top of that which we call the personal assistant license and that's the high end license for the telephony presence and availability piece. And that's licensed like UM on a per seat basis. So if you want somebody to be able to get in and read their calendar over the phone, if you want them to have a schedule that says during the day here is the umbers you can reach me at; that very high end functionality is also licensed.

Ok thanks Neil, actually it looks like that is the last question. The only one left here is about getting a copy of the slides so I think we covered that.

Slide 22 — Voicemail to Unified Communications: 10 Steps for Securing a Strong ROI.

So once again thanks everyone for joining us. You can find additional webinars that get scheduled on the AVST website on the event page. Again thanks for your time this morning and we look forward to visiting with you on a future webinar.

Thank you.

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