Welcome

Welcome and thank you for joining us for the webinar Modernize Your IT Communications. I'm Anne Rude, Marketing Manager at AVST, and presenting today is Neil Butler, our Director of Sales Engineering. During this session we'll discuss how AVST bridges the gap between historical IT and Telcom investments and the new IP enabled world, which includes: How to create a centralized infrastructure with higher resiliency, a future proof migration strategy from TDM to IP telephony, delivering enhanced mobility to the workforce, and automating business processes to increase productivity. And with that, I'll go ahead and give it over to Neil, and he can get us started.

Thank you, Anne. Good morning, and/or afternoon, depending on where you're participating from. Today's another one in our series of webinars sort of about the infrastructure side of your business. It's a very challenging time for everyone. There're two major forces, I think, hitting head to head for most of us. One, unfortunately, is the economy, and our drive to do more with less and maintain our profit margins is a very strong component in every discussion we have. The other one is we're kind of facing a time when, some of the infrastructures, in terms of the telephony side, have fallen behind. Not that they don't have the functionality that's needed, but the pace of change in the business world is constantly increasing, and as we start merging telephony and other business apps, what we find is the telephony infrastructure is the one that's lagging behind for most of us. So what we're going to look at is kind of some of the ways to address that. No one really has the budgets today to simply rip and replace and bring all of their infrastructure up to where they'd like to have it. But there are definitely some areas where there is a strong drive to change what we're doing today, particularly as we start looking at unified communications and tying these various parts of our infrastructure together. So today we're going to look at a couple of those areas, and we're going to talk about an approach where you can get started on some of the things, without really needing the massive budgets you would need to do all of it.

Business Objectives

We going to really focus on Reuse and Leveraging your existing assets. There are a number of areas where you can add functionality. You can get some of the projects going that you want that don't really require taking out, anything perhaps, what's in your site. We're then going to look at a couple of those. One of which is the Centralized Messaging and the Resiliency piece, which we find from customers to be one of the top interests that everyone has. And then we're going to look at some of the individual projects for business growth, like Unified Messaging and other mobile applications. And with all of these, we're going to focus on using the CallXpress system as sort of a leverage point, to take what you already have, tie it together, and be able to deploy those solutions with an act minimum investment of replacing things. We understand, down the road, most of you will have projects for replacing lots of the elements in your telephony infrastructure. Some of you have already done some of that, I'm sure, and others are in the middle of it, but it's still good to know that you can get a start on a lot of this while leaving those in place, and not be locking yourself in to any fixed architecture, or any fixed product, as you get started.

Interoperability: Existing Landscape

So if we sort of start by looking at the CallXpress architecture, and why we think the CallXpress product is sort of a unique product in this space, particularly we talk about leveraging and extending your existing landscape. The thing that makes this different is the basic core architecture is built with a central core set of solutions, and then a layer of interoperability interfaces that connect to the outside world. So anything with CallXpress, when it connects, whether it connects with an e-mail system, a phone system, or one of your business services, it always goes through an interoperability layer, gives us the flexibility to basically go in and connect to whatever any customer has. We never have to walk into the enterprise and say, "Here're our wonderful solutions, and here're the other things in your enterprise you need to change to make these work." We are the largest independent player in this space, and we really target everything that's out there. So we're going to look at this architecture, and how it's going to let you do a number of things that are probably pretty high on your interest list, with not having to replace the other things you have in your enterprise.

Interoperability: Telephony

The first and obvious one is on the telephony side. As the largest independent provider, we owe no massive allegiance to any particular phone vendor, and so what we do is make all of our solutions work on all of the phone systems. Now, on one level it only really matters if it works on the one phone system you have, if you just have one phone system, but looking towards the future, between acquisitions and replacement of legacy infrastructure, quite often customers face the challenge of having to support more than one particular type of telephone system, either for the short term or even for the long term. And the great thing about CallXpress is we can connect to all of them. It's one of the few products out there that's not targeted for one particular vendor's phone system. We integrate to just about everything else out there on the market, and we're going to see that what that lets you do is start to deploy some of these solutions, even if you aren't really ready to do the rip and replace or the migration strategy to get you to the all new IP infrastructure. And that's going to be something that for a lot of you means you can get started earlier than maybe you had planned to do.

Not only can CallXpress connect to anything, but it can hook to large groups of things on the telephony side. We can support integrations of up to ten different types of telephone systems on a single CallXpress system. So if you have an environment, as many of you do, that grew through acquisition and merger, it's quite likely that you have three or four types of telephone systems out there, and centralization is high on everyone's list these days because of the cost effect, but centralizing all of your phone systems might be a little lower on your list because of the amount of money that takes. Some of you have some voicemails that have to get replaced—like legacy systems that are going out of support. It's good to know you can take CallXpress and replace all of those voicemails, and all those different types of phone systems with a single integrated voicemail. CallXpress with actually let you go out and connect all of them, make it a single voicemail, and now you're ready as you move forward and start centralizing your telephony environment, you already have the messaging environment centralized. While it might mean moving some servers around, there's no way that you would have to go and change anything out. We'll be able to integrate to whatever systems you move to as well. So there's a big advantage to interoperability, in terms of letting you get started now, and still being able to move ahead.

Interoperability: E-mail

If we look at the other major point that people are looking at right now, there's an awful lot of integrations to groupware for various solutions, and we're going to look at a couple of them here a little later on, and we have that same level of flexibility, again, by using interoperability layers, we're not really firmly tied to any particular package. So if you're an Exchange user today, that's fine, if you're a Notes user today, that's fine, if you're Exchange and moving to Gmail, we're okay with that, if you have a big Mirapoint set-up going, or any IMAP4, we can hook to them. And the same with the telephony integration. We can not only connect to any of these, we can connect to any mix of these. So once again if you're in that world where you've merged companies in the last few years, and you haven't quite finished merging your infrastructure on the data side, and you actually have Notes and Outlook in place, and maybe an IMAP server somewhere else, that's no challenge for CallXpress. As we look at these applications that we're going to want to deploy, we're going to be able to do it in all of these environments, including knowing you can move them. So today, if you want to look at Unified Messaging, but you know next year, you have a project where you're looking to move some of your Groupware to the Cloud, through Gmail or something along that, there's no problem with starting the CallXpress deployment, because we not only support that Cloud environment, but we support migrating to it. It's very simple. So once again, whatever your environment entails, we're going to be able to be there and connect to it, and allow you to change it if you need to.

Interoperability: Business Productivity

This is probably one of the most interesting markets for us going forward in the next few years. A lot of the functionality we have can be generalized because there're a limited number of popular phone systems and e-mail systems in the enterprise market. When we get down to connecting to the other solutions, it gets a lot more complex. There are lots of products and lots of technologies out there, and there's a great opportunity to take the CallXpress core functionality of messaging and calls and call routing, and enhance your existing applications. So rather than us building individual point solutions and trying to guess which ones people want, what we're going to see a little later is that we have a set of extensibility tools that, once again, with that interoperability layer means that if you need to make a click to dial feature inside your program, it doesn't matter whether it's Oracle, or Exchange, or SalesForce, or whether it's using XML, or older Legacy API's. All of those are supported on the CallXpress system. So once again, the systems you have in place are what we can use to develop these applications for you, minimizing your investment, and the training hassle. We're not going to ask you to change out anything, just to add some new functionality on the CallXpress side.

Interoperability: Applications and Platform

Our own applications are just as flexible as our connections. If you look at the core pieces that we offer, you're going to see that the architectures that we support are completely configurable for your environment. Whether you're centralized or distributed, whether you're a mix of premise and private, or all premise or all cloud, if you're looking at high availability and disaster sites, such as failover sites and continuity plans, all of that is possible with our core applications. The flexibility comes from the fact that once inside the heart of the system, when it communicates to the external world, is very tightly controlled through these interoperability layers, and that gives us more flexibility than anyone else has.

Virtualization

As we talk about that flexibility, certainly one of the things that come up in, if not all discussions, a large number of the discussions is the availability to minimize costs by virtualizing those systems, and indeed, the components of CallXpress can be run on the VMware vSphere product. Not all of them are quite capable of being on that yet, but most of the key ones, like the Call Servers that actually handle calls, and our web interfaces, and our applications that actually serve performance all can be virtualized. And that's, again, for those of you who either have or are moving to a virtual environment, it's good to know that whatever directions you have, CallXpress is going to be able to ride along with that. We're not laying out all these boundaries that you have to fall within.

Business Objectives

If we look at that core architecture, what we can do from that is now look at some of the challenges that are facing you, and how leveraging that architecture within your environment is going to be a very easy thing to do. Much easier than with products that are very specifically focused, or vendors that say, "You have to change out five or six of these at once." We're really into letting you deploy these applications with what you have today.

Infrastructure Flexibility

So let's take a look at the centralized messaging. For some of you that only have one site, you can take a break and get some coffee for this piece. But an awful lot of our customers have multiple sites, and multiple sites bring a whole level of new challenges. There are training issues and deployment issues, and support issues. Typically multiple sites quite frequently develop with acquisitions, and they're not unique in terms of out at one site you have one mix of voicemail and perhaps different phone systems, and at another site is completely different. Most customers have gotten pretty good at getting their Groupware centralized, and a lot of their data infrastructure centralized, but when they look at starting to centralize their telephony network, the challenge is a big one. It involves a lot of money in replacing systems in a lot of cases. So they're working their way through it, and as they do, there're still some issues they need to deal with, maybe a little more urgently, and one of those, of course, is replacing Legacy voicemail. So we're going to look real quickly here, at all of the different types of architecture that we can support as you move from a distributed environment to a centralized environment. And we'll also look at the definitions of what the centralized environments are, because there're a couple of different ways to do that.

Networked Messaging, No PBX Networking

If we start by taking a look at what's out there today, a lot of customers that have a distributed environment have basically a set of PBX's, with a set of CallXpress or whatever voicemail systems they have out there. Functionally, this is not bad. Everyone has the functions they need, but there's certainly a maintenance issue with doing it this way, in terms of training and what it takes to maintain those systems cost-wise. So even in that older technology, we offer some things you can do in terms of tying the CallXpress system together. When CallXpress systems get tied together with a centralized server, which is a repository for the database. This means from an administrator's point of view, you can connect to one screen to maintain all of your systems. From a user's point of view, you can have a personal distribution list that has people on all the different systems. So we can start your centralization without changing your infrastructure. We can simply take your onsite voicemails and put a copy of CallXpress in, and network them.

Centralized Messaging, PBX Networked

Now that's a good start, but a lot of people really see that as still having the same challenges of having the boxes out on site, and there are better ways to do this. The first way most vendors will sort of nudge a customer in, and this is a very good way to start, is to centralize the PBX infrastructure by networking the PBX. So if you have four or five PBXs, you can tie them together, you can put in packages for networking and inner styling, and then you can put a single voicemail unified messaging system off any one of those systems, and now you've got a centralized voicemail, even though it's only a partially centralized telephony infrastructure. This was really prorammatic for years because the PBX's pretty much had to be the same kind of PBX's, the networking protocols between them, although there are some generic ones, to really do integrated voicemail and Call Processing, it needed to be an Avaya switch to an Avaya switch, to a Nortel switch to a Nortel switch, etc. Now that's changing. There're a lot of really nice technologies that are available that will actually let you tie disparate PBX's together for this kind of functionality. So this is another version where, no matter how you're networking your PBX's together, we can go into that network and allow you to replace maybe five or six Legacy voicemail systems with a single centralized voicemail system, and it's all about having that interoperability layer.

New Centralized Messaging with CallXpress

Now if we get down to something that's a little more unique in terms of what we can do, if you have these PBX's, and I'm assuming for most of these sites that these are separate PBX's out at the sites and you're not ready to tie them together yet, but you certainly have other applications you need to deploy, and other problems you need to solve. CallXpress is sort of unique in that one of the other ways we can do this, is we can replace each of those voicemails onsite with a component of a single CallXpress system. So those Call Servers you see out at each PBX are actually all part of one voicemail, and that System Server at whatever location is appropriate is controlling them all. So this is another way to centralize, and this is a little better because you can end up literally with a single voicemail. So even though there are multiple servers, you have a single voicemail. We'll kind of look at some of the reasons you use multiple servers in a few seconds here. But this centralization process makes it much easier for you to get started in cleaning up your messaging environment today, even if you're not ready to do anything with your PBX's. The other great thing is, let's say the top PBX, you're ready now to replace that with a Gateway. So you have a main PBX now becomes an IP Gateway off your main PBX. You can either leave that Call Server there, or you can move it to the main site, and have it integrated through the IP solutions. We're not locking you into any architecture. When you get started, we'll find the best architecture for you, based on what you have today and what your plans are, but you're going to be able to do anything you need to in your infrastructure, and just move those CallXpress elements around as it's appropriate, depending on what it is you're doing.

Enterprise Resiliency

What we've done to accomplish this is we've changed our architecture from a monolithic server, where everything on CallXpress literally ran on one physical server, which was great, and highly reliable. We have 40,000 customers using that version and they're pretty happy with it, but there were some things we couldn't accomplish. So what we did a few years ago was we took our software and broke it into components. We have the Call Server component, which is the work horse. This is the real-time engine. It connects to the phone system, it answers the phone, it's the one that interfaces with the callers, it runs all the applications, it plays all the prompts as the user interface, it records the messages, and that's the real-time piece. You have to have at least one of those in a CallXpress. And then the other piece is the centralized piece, which has the centralized message database, the user database, the diagnostic tools, the administration interfaces, and you have to have at least one of those as well. So a single CallXpress instance could be one Call Server, and one System Server, both of those packages installed on a single physical server. We still can do a single voicemail—that's still a very popular solution in a lot of markets. But what changes now is our ability to deploy multiple Call Servers. So in the picture on the right you can see I've deployed a system now where I've got three Call Servers and a single System Server, and that's still one centralized voicemail system. Each one of those Call Servers gets replicated data from the System Server, so they're identical in terms of knowing about all the users, they have all the greetings, they have every bit of information they need to answer any call from any person for any person. Those Call Servers can either all be split, so instead of a 72 port single system, you have three 24 port Call Servers. We'll see the advantage of that in a second. Or they could be out somewhere on different sites. I could have three sites, each with a Call Server, all tied to a single System Server, and that's how I'm getting my centralized voicemail functionality.

The complex picture for this looks like this, where I have up to 20 Call Servers deployed at whatever sites are appropriate, with whatever mix of ports I need, and that is now a single voicemail. If any one of these has a problem, if anything fails, we're going to see in a second, we have the high availability functionality to keep everything working. So beyond just availability, which we obviously got when we added more Call Servers, the ability to offer high availability solutions is the next piece. So centralization, that's great to have multiple Call Servers, but the high availability piece is the other area where it really shines.

So if you look at the kind of deployment we can do here, this first screen that comes up shows actually a high availability deployment. Now if I have multiple Call Servers and I lose a Call Server, the other ones keep on working, so even if I had a single site, I could have 2 Call Servers, each with 24 ports, and if one fails, I would lose some capacity, but everything else would keep on working. During most times of the day, I could get away with less capacity, probably without or having much impact anyway. So that's one of those pieces. The second piece is if the System Server fails—now that's the centralized message database—so I'm going to lose some functionality, but what I'm going to lose is the ability for users to call in and access their messages. The rest of the functionality is survivable. The Call Servers can still run without a System Server. They will answer the call, they will run all the call processing applications, they'll even record all the new messages, and they'll cache those messages, and when the time comes that the System Server is back online, they'll move them there and everything will go back to normal. So even without buying anything extra, just having Call Servers and a System Server, I'll get a pretty high level of high availability, but obviously, the ability to have everything work when something fails is a driving factor. So we offer as an option a high availability System Server, or a hot standby System Server. And what this is, is an set-up where I have two System Servers, one is actually running, and the other is monitoring the active service. Every bit of information written to the drive on the System Server is immediately copied on the System Server, crossed over every network to the high availability backup server there, and it is capable of taking over if the System Server fails or if the health routines show that backup server that there is something wrong, it can shut that server down, and take over, establish communications with the Call Server, and you're back in business. That process can take anywhere from a minute to ten minutes, depending on the size of the system, but keep in mind that the Call Servers are still taking calls that whole time. Even calls in progress aren't interrupted. So now by adding this one optional component at a single site, I have full high availability. Anything can fail, and the system will keep on working with full capability. If I can't afford to lose half my ports at one time, I could deploy that on three or four Call Servers, and minimize even that percentage of the risk. That's what we call high availability on a single site. Now the other piece of course we have is beyond a single site, customers come to us, and they're also interested in Disaster Recovery. Now for us, disaster recovery has to do with I have more than one site.

Enterprise Resiliency – Disaster Recovery

Those sites might be just a Disaster Recovery site, a data center that recovers backup data center, or it might be the setup that I see quite often where I have two main sites and they sort of back each other up. In either case, what I have the availability to do here is take and put a third server out at the remote site. It's just like the other server, it's completely updated automatically with everything on it, and if I were to lose that site—let's say construction crews came in and with a back hoe took out all of my power and telephony entrance cables. My fiber's gone, everything, I have a dark building, and the construction people are scratching their heads, and they tell me it's going to take them two weeks to run new cables in the way they need to do it. If I have this Disaster Recovery site, as an administrator, I log into that site, I activate that third server, it establishes communication with any Call Server it can still find—now the ones in that main building might not be of use, but I can have other ones in that disaster center or even in other locations—and then once again, within five to twenty minutes, I am back up and running. This can run now for whatever time it takes to bring the main site back up. When the main site comes back up, I switch back to it, and I'm back in high availability mode.

Deployment Options

So I really have a wide array of options. I certainly can do a single site with multiple Call Servers, and that gives me some level of flexibility. If you look at the top entry, you see that just having multiple Call Servers; I still have some high availability. And the next levels I would add the System Server, the hot standby backup server, and now I have full functionality within that building. And then as an option, I can either put in a Disaster Recovery setup in, with or without the System Server for high availability. So I have those four options, in terms of resiliency, and it's just a matter of how I view my business, what my parameters are, what's been given to me as a corporate objective for hitting this level of reliability, this kind of continuity plan, and pretty much, with CallXpress, you have the components to do whichever version you find you need to do. Obviously adding them in later is easy as well.

Maximum Capacity

If I look at this distributed architecture with multiple Call Servers, what you see is a single CallXpress system now can be up to 384 ports, can support over 40,000 users, 20,000 of them configured for unified messaging, and any single Call Server, whether it's a single system with a single server and Call Server, or single Call Server out at any location, can support up to 96 ports if I'm not running my automatic speech recognition, my speech rec engine, or up to 48 ports if I am. But in either case I can get 384 ports. Given this flexibility, there isn't much in the way of an architecture that we can't sit down and put the components on the whiteboard fairly easily, once you've decided what the rest of your infrastructure looks like. Now the other good thing, remember, is that those drawings tend to change over time, so if we go out and deploy this in one manner, it's a very simple thing, we simply move some of those servers from one place to another, and change it to match your constantly changing telephony infrastructure. Eventually most of us hope to get to that point where I have one or two centralized locations, where all my telephony resources, and my data network and everything is centralized out of, and then everything else is hubbed off of that. Getting there, though, sometimes is the trick, and that's what this flexible architecture is going to let you do.

Business Objective

If we look at those pieces, the Centralized Messaging and the Resiliency, kind of the last thing to look at, is that we also have some challenges in some of the new solutions we want to deploy. Unified communications gets a lot of press, gets renamed every couple of years, but the concept is pretty simple: I need my employees to be as productive as they possibly can in this economic world where everything is as tight as it is. So I need to tie things together. Tying things together extends that functionality, and I have projects I want to do, but once again, sometimes I'm being told I have to take everything out to do them. I have to change everything, and just from a business disruption point of view, I can't really face that.

Top Unified Communications Technology

We have a lot of experience in this area, because the most deployed unified communications technology right now is Unified Messaging. Sometimes we forget that that's kind of unified communications, by definition, but if you go out and talk to people in terms of what they did first, what they're looking at doing, unified communications—the bulk of where the budget is still—is unified messaging. There're a lot of pieces coming up quick behind, but the unified messaging pieces where most people have already started, or are intending to start, and that's actually explanary for us.

Leadership Recognition in Unified Messaging

We've been doing Unified Messaging since 1989. We were the first ones on the market with it. We've been doing it so long that we've got the most complex kind of matrix of things we could show you. Very simple though—once we sit down with your site, what we tell you is that you just have to decide how to do it, and our product can be configured that way. If you go to any of the analysts out there that have been tracking Unified Messaging, you'll find they say AVST offers the best-in-class Unified Messaging solution. Even though we're a smaller player than most of those other people in that quadrant, because of the completeness of our solution, we're really up there high in terms of our ability.

What is Unified Messaging?

If we look at Unified Messaging as a general concept, I think most of us understand, we have all these messaging and communication types, we have all these devices and terminals, and as we move from device to device, in most cases, for most of you, your functionality changes. From the phone you have a nice message waiting light so you can get your voicemail, from the computer you get your e-mail, you leave with your mobile device, you can probably get your e-mail pushed through if it's a blackberry, you can call in with it and get part of your voicemail. But that whole way we all work gets lost. For most of us, we actually work in a very similar manner. In each business, most of us use what is called the information knowledge loop. In other words, we come to work in the morning, we fire up our e-mail, we triage our messages, we pick an important message, open it up, read it, decide what it is we need to do. We call a co-worker, we send another e-mail message, we create a meeting in our calendar, we do whatever we need to and then we move on to the next message. That works great at our desk, but what we really need to do is extend as much of that as we can to those workers who are mobile. ‘Cause let's face it—quite often our mobile work force is both an expensive work force and an important workforce. So the trick with Unified Messaging and Unified Communication is to extend their tools. The first and easiest thing you can do is to deploy Unified Messaging.

Outlook 2010

If you look at this Outlook 2010 screenshot, it becomes pretty apparent. In terms of this, what I've got is e-mail, voicemail, and if I have it enabled, fax, all in a single tool. So when I go now and open up my messages, what I see is all my messages. That lets me kind of prioritize between voicemail and e-mail. Coming to your desk and seeing nothing but a red light on really doesn't tell you much, other than you have a message, but quickly, going through that list and seeing who your messages are from gives you a pretty good idea what your day's going to look like.

Server Unified Messaging

So when we go to do Unified Messaging, there're a couple of ways to do it. The great thing about our product is that you can choose how you want to do it. One of the most typical ways to do it for a lot of people is to put the voice and fax messages onto the e-mail server. It's not the only way. We're certainly not limited to that, but it's a popular way because we'll now leverage your infrastructure. You've probably just spent a fortune on centralizing and beefing up your messaging infrastructure—you have web access tools, you have remote devices that you're pushing messages to, you have cache mode or replication where your laptop users have their messages with them. If you put your voice and fax messages into that environment, they now leverage on every tool they have. As an example, I have two different mobile phones, and I have two different laptops, and wherever I am and turn any of those on, I have all my messages immediately at my disposal. That does a number of things: one, it makes me much more responsive, it extends my reach—I can work anywhere where those devices are available, and then it also, of course, makes me more productive, because I'm seeing everything at once, and I'm making the right decisions on how I spend my time. So the Unified Messaging piece is a very important first piece.

Server Unified Messaging (Hosted)

Now what we're finding, is while this is very popular in a lot of places, there's also a drive to at least evaluate moving those messages offsite. Taking that really expensive Exchange or Notes infrastructure you're maintaining, and moving to a hosted service like Google Gmail. We have, actually, a number of customers who have already done this. They're pretty much happy with it, and we're following it pretty closely. But once again, with CallXpress, because of that interoperability layer, we can simply substitute in a different protocol and support you. So if you put our product in today—let's say it's connected to Exchange—and next year you move to Google Gmail, it's simply a matter of going in and programming the connector with a different set of protocols that now let you have all that same functionality, even though you've moved to a hosted or a cloud-based solution. We are very big on monitoring what's going on in that particular industry; including looking at our own cloud-based application that you might see something in the news about next year. This is a definite business trend, but we want to make sure that when you decide that's the right thing for you, our product can go along with you.

Client Unified Messaging

We also have other versions of Unified Messaging though. We're certainly not limited to putting it into the e-mail server. While that does kind of give you maximum functionality, I know for a lot of customers that's a concern for any number of reasons. So we also allow you to have Unified Messaging when you put your messages on CallXpress and leave them there. You can simply connect your e-mail client directly to CallXpress, as if it's another kind of e-mail store, and now, in your client, you get your voice, fax and e-mail messages. What you'll get is two different inboxes. You'll get an inbox that has voice and fax, and you'll get an inbox that has e-mail. From the desktop, the functionality is exactly the same. And once again, we support this in any environment you happen to choose. If you're Exchange, if you're Notes, if you're GroupWise, none of that makes any difference to us—we simply program the connector appropriately.

E-mail Access

In terms of what we support out there in the market today, we're always really close to being spot on and current. If you look at the product today, we're right up and working with the latest in Exchange 2010, the latest in Notes—there's really nothing that I'm aware of out there that's a current e-mail product that we can't give you this functionality with. So once again, no matter what you have in your enterprise, we're going to leverage what you've already invested in.

Unified Messaging

The strength of our Unified Messaging product is not just in the features. Lots of people have lots of good features. It's in the flexibility. In so many cases, what you do today and what you want to do next year are going to change, so you want to make sure that whatever products you start loading into your toolkit there, have that flexibility. So if you want to deploy it all on an Exchange server today, but move it to the cloud next year, we're a pretty good choice of product for that because we already support all of that kind of functionality.

Mobility

Now beyond messaging, there're other solutions that are really being pushed at you because they're the same thing—they're the productivity side—the let's make our people, in most cases our field people, more productive, because those are the revenue generators, those are the expensive employees. So there's a whole world of mobility applications, and it runs the gambit of which mobile devices you support, how you support them, and then, from the phone side, how people connect to them; from the e-mail side, are you pushing messages out, and all of that is very important. So we play in a number of those areas and, once again, using your existing phone system, your existing Groupware, we support things like a Find Me/Follow Me functionality, where I can license a user, have a list of numbers, different call lists. So at one time in the day, let's say during his morning commute, if somebody tries to get in touch with him, it'll ring his mobile phone. Whereas, starting when he gets to work, it'll ring his desk phone, and if he doesn't answer his desk phone because he's away from his desk, it'll try his mobile phone. So he can actually have lists for all of that, and he can control those lists, both through a speech interface, and a mobile client. So imagine, you've set yourself up so your list says you're working at your desk all day today, and then you get a call from an important customer, you grab your briefcase and you head out the door, and just as you get in your car you realize you forgot to change it on your screen, you can simply pick up your mobile device, go to that mobile web app and hit a button. Now you've redirected your calls to your mobile, or you put them on do not disturb, or however you want to handle it. So all of that functionality is available to a mobile user. Likewise, that same mobile user, with license, can call in, read his calendar for the day, create new appointments, and create new meetings. Basically, we're getting to that point where info worker loop at the desktop is pretty close to being available to a mobile user. Accessing their contacts, accessing their calendar, having all that kind of functionality, even when they're mobile, and particularly in a hands-free environment with speech, it's something that you can deploy today regardless of the phone system you have, the e-mail system you have—any of that. Once again, this is our ability to connect whatever you have in your office today.

Call Screening

Now the truth about that of course is once you're much easier to reach, you have some issues there with how you can still be productive, so we add into that feature package the ability for you to make the decision whether those incoming calls are more or less important than what you're currently doing. The way we do that is with a call screening app, which a lot of people have, but then based on you getting that information, you'll hear a prompt like, "You have a call from John Smith. Would you like to accept the call, reject the call, transfer, or acknowledge?" Now with these kinds of options, you're in really good shape. If you accept the call because you realize "This is somebody I want to talk to," then you can also record that call by saying "Accept and Record," if that's appropriate. If it's not somebody you want to talk to because what you're doing is more important, then you say reject, and they get a nice handoff to your voicemail system. Now you might know what this person wants and you want to transfer it to a co-worker to be taken care of, so you can say transfer. It'll ask you who to send it to, and then it'll let you record a little preamble for that person, like say, "This is John Smith. He's the guy we're doing those configurations for. Can you go ahead and help him out?" Or you can acknowledge that caller and say, "Oh John, listen. I'm just going into a meeting. I'll be about 25 minutes. As soon as I get out of the meeting, I'll give you a call." You hang up, you go into your meeting, and your productivity is ensured. John hears a callback expectation. He hears you're going to call him, and out he goes. Now in the case where you forget to call him, you climb in your car and head to your next appointment with your Bluetooth, you call into CallXpress, and you hear that message you left for John, and you go, "Oh, I guess I need to call him." We captured his ANI number, you say, "Call back," and now you're connected to that person. So the integrated tools, for having it all integrated on one platform, create a very powerful and very productive set of features for mobile users.

The other thing this application does, which is very important, and the most of us kind of know this because of mistakes we've made in the past, it does some things with fixed mobile convergence, which is very popular area for a lot of people right now, that are really not obvious right off the top, but if you think about them, you can see why they're important. For one thing, you now can have a single number. I don't have to give people a business card with my home office, my office, and my mobile number, and not giving out numbers is a good thing. Now obviously you want people to be able to get in touch with you, but you really can't control anything once you give out the source number. So by giving them a single number, and you controlling where those calls go, based on those call lists we talked about, you now have complete control over your own life. Which means, bad day, nasty traffic, 5:30, you can call in and say, "Enable do not disturb," and you can turn on your tunes and ride home in comfort, because you're burned out after a busy day. The second thing it does is that it allows you to have a single mailbox. When you call me on my mobile phone, if I don't answer, it goes into my system, and all my messages are in one place. I don't have to be checking multiple places. I even have my home answering machine set up so that it doesn't answer until a certain number of rings, and my CallXpress system will pull that call back. So if somebody calls me and I have one on my list with my phone number on it for home, it will never end up on my home answering machine if it's a business number. So complete control to the user. The more we can make the user productive, the better, and the way you do that is give them tools, and give them control over their environment.

Speech

One of the things about mobile people of course is they spend a lot of time in a car and it's very difficult, at the very least, unsafe, to be doing a lot of this stuff in your car while you're driving. So what we've got is a set of speech-enabled applications that really help that out. There're a number of things. First thing is it creates a complete speech-driven automated attendant for your system. So now you can have an application that says, "Good morning, please say the first and last name of the person you're trying to reach," or prompt them for departments or locations or whatever's appropriate. And a full-speech driven automated attendant with alias names and disambiguation—a very powerful app that's been around for a while. The other thing it gives you is the full hands-free interface for your users. So when I get in my car in the morning, and I call in, and I hear, "Hello Neil Butler. What would you like to do?", I say, "What are my appointments for today," I say, "Get my new messages," I say, "Call…" and say the name of someone, and the end result is that I can make that productive time almost as productive as when I'm sitting at my desk. It's much safer, I'm not doing these Blackberry dives down into my lap with my mobile device, I'm able to focus more on the road, and for a lot of us that involves some safety laws, I am compliant, and that's a very important piece. So extending productivity for those non-productive blocks of time. Now some of those—people say, "Well I don't need this because I use my Blackberry." Certainly, when you're sitting in the airport waiting for a plane, it's really nice to open up your mobile device and have your e-mail and your voicemail there, and be able to run them off that device. But there are times, particularly when you're driving in a car, where it's also handy to have a speech interface, and the more choices, the more productivity you gain.

Call Processing

If we look at this kind of core functionality that's on the product, we certainly started as a Call Processing/Automated Attendant voicemail system. All those features are still there. We were lucky. We started at a time when open systems architecture was available. So from day one, CallXpress was on a platform that used standard hardware operating systems, etc., which means we have every voicemail feature we've ever put into the product, and we started in 1982. Trust me; it's a lot of features. So we have everything you would want, in terms of whatever you have on your system today—unlimited menus, unlimited answering modes, if you end up deploying CallXpress across three time zones, every set of different lines could be answered with different schedules, different holidays, very powerful, and very flexible. What we do add to that though, and I mentioned this, is that I can also speech-enable that entire process, where instead of asking people to press keys, I can prompt them to speak simple speech commands. Very nice and very easy to use. If you have something that goes beyond what goes into the call processing world, we're going to see in a little while, we have the ability to run a custom IVR application, right on this platform. It's not extra cards and hardware, it's just a license, and once you have it, then you'll see how can deploy custom applications, and these are particularly good for interfacing with some of your other business processes.

Voicemail

If I look at voicemail, it's the same story as call processing. This is an Ideal Legacy Replacement voicemail, because we've got thirty years of features in here, so if you're taking out an Aria, a Serenade, an Intuitiy, a Meridian Mail, we have all those features. We've competed with those products for years, and we were able to take our existing product and keep it alive. We didn't have to do the technology reset that all the other vendors did. In a matter of timing, we started at exactly the right time. And if you're replacing one of those systems, we have a full set of alternate telephone user interfaces. So if you have an Aria, then CallXpress will sound like an Aria; if you have an Intuity, it can sound like an Intuity. Very easy, minimizes disruption, minimizes training, and just makes it a lot easier as you migrate from one system to the other. We support a full system of networking protocols. Basically, if you're using any kind of network today, we're going to be able to step in and make sure, as we go through the migration process, you don't lose connectivity between your systems. We have a number of interfaces that allow you to support your PBX and Voicemail System at the same time. Our licensing structure is very unique. We don't license storage space, we don't license voicemail mailboxes, so you're going to find the ability to sort of mix and match what you need on our system, which will probably be a financial advantage as you sit down and look at that configuration.

UCConnect Development Framework

Now we talked earlier, and we had a slide actually that talked about, you know, you have other things beyond the typical applications people are talking about today. You have a need for your remote salesforce to get into your sales management tool. You have a need for your customers to access your manufacturing database to find out when their orders are coming through. There's a whole world of specialized applications that just are too specialized for people to package them up, shrink-wrap them, and sell them to you. You literally have to create some of those yourself. To do that, we have two pieces of functionality that are available on CallXpress, under the UCConnect banner. One is a full interactive IVR module. If I add that module, I can get developers to go into Visual Studio, and write custom IVR apps that access any of my other systems. As long as you have a system that has a programmatic interface, which pretty much everything does today, and as long as you can describe the app, then you can go in and build it with this. And this lets you build traditional IVR, but it also accesses CallXpress. We also include with it a Soap API into the system, so you now can do all kinds of things. You can write all kinds of custom applications that use the database, the engine and the calling ability of CallXpress as something that you were going to put on your system today. This is something that we don't spend a lot of time in presentations on, because everyone is unique, but this is an excellent subject for an offline discussion, if this triggered something where you think perhaps there's something of interest there.

The UC framework is great because it spans your environment. Your groupware, your phone system, your call center. All these things you have where in each area there's just like one thing that maybe somebody would like to have, if it's something that's really of value to you, we're going to be able to talk about how to build it, using the accessibility tools on CallXpress 8.

AVST

As we kind of wrap this up, I just want to look at what we were talking about. You have challenges, and the challenges basically have to do with less budget, the need for more productivity, an aging telephony infrastructure in some cases, a desire to centralize, both for ease of operation and ease of use, and obviously the ongoing TCO. The way we approach that is we've got the interoperability layer, which means we can connect to what you have today. Yes, if you have all brand new stuff, if you have the latest and greatest of everything, if you have a new voice over IP phone system, if you have Exchange 2010, we're happy to do that, we fit right into that world. But if you're a more traditional customer, with three or four sites and two different kinds of phone systems, and an older version of this, and an older version of that, our interoperability layer lets us play in that market as well. Despite the fact that we can connect all that, we don't limit functionality. Unified Messaging on an old phone system works just as good as Unified Messaging on a new phone system. We are able to take all those features we had and deploy them to you, no matter what your environment. A lot of people are going to tell you, "Oh, if you want to get that good stuff, you have to yank out all of this," and it's just not true. If you hear that, give us a call and let us come out and talk to you. On the mobility side, that's kind of the brave new frontier, we probably have two or three really nice new mobility features every software release now, because more and more people are mobile, and keeping those people productive becomes more of a challenge, but they're getting great tools. They're getting much better smart phones now, so doing some of this stuff on a smart phone makes a lot more sense than it did doing it on an older GMS type mobile phone a few years ago. Then for those things that are unique to you, we have extensibility. We joke sometimes in Sales Engineering that the answer is never No—when someone says, "Can you do this," the answer is always yes—although sometimes we need to have a discussion about what that will cost, because building, obviously, custom apps will cost a little more than what the shrink-wrapped product delivers. But if you have a process, if you have a problem in one solution area, and it has to do with communications and a data set somewhere in your system, we are going to be able to offer you a solution for that, and have discussions on exactly how you would want to deploy that.

Thank You

Anything else, Neil, that you'd like to say in closing?

I have to say that I get a fantastic chance to go out and meet with literally hundreds of customers a year who face the challenges we've talked about. If you go back three or four years, the industry was just really rolling. People had realized they needed new infrastructure, it was in everyone's budgets, getting rid of some of this Legacy equipment was happening at a good pace, and then of course, the economy did the flip it did, and unfortunately what that did was take all the money and funding away, but still left all the pressures. So all I can really suggest is, when you're looking at this challenge of what you have of all these people are asking you and telling you to do, and you're looking at your budget and the numbers aren't matching, don't give up hope. Give us a call. It's amazing how much we can do with the infrastructure you have today to at least get you started delivering some core pieces, some great productivity, some really visible changes in what you offer your users, once again, without requiring you to work up the big dollars for infrastructure changes.

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