FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif., July 30, 2008 – Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) today announced that CallXpress 7.91, the newest version of its flagship Unified Communications solution, was selected by Manatee County, Florida to enhance and expand the existing deployment of CallXpress throughout the County’s offices.  CallXpress 7.91 delivers a host of new capabilities and features that address the needs of multi-site organizations demanding greater capacity, interconnectivity and interoperability with the latest IP-PBX, groupware and server technology.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Manatee County developed a disaster recovery strategy that included the decentralization of the County’s communications infrastructure to protect their multi-site organization from a catastrophic county-wide communications failure.  The enhanced digital networking capabilities of CallXpress 7.91 enabled Manatee County to efficiently and economically network four discrete CallXpress systems to form one large County-wide “virtual” system.  This architecture provided the necessary assurance that if one system went down, the remainder of the County’s communications network would remain operational.  In addition, the new global administration capabilities of CallXpress 7.91 greatly simplified maintenance by enabling the County’s IT staff to simultaneously manage all four geographically distributed CallXpress systems from a single global view.

With 1,700 employees located at many sites across the County and over 5,000 mailboxes spread across four geographically dispersed County locations including County Administration, Judicial Center, Public Safety and Utility Operations, enhancing the survivability of the County’s communications network has been a critical initiative.  The new digital networking capabilities of CallXpress 7.91 enabled the County to more efficiently and economically network multiple systems together and send messages back and forth across these systems transparently.  In the event of a catastrophe or failure at one site, the majority of the network remains intact.

 “We were one of the first AVST customers to upgrade to CallXpress 7.91,” said George Igartua, Telecommunications Manager for the Manatee County Government.  “Completing the upgrade has added resiliency to our network, simplified system administration and protected mission-critical operations by taking us away from a centralized system.”

CallXpress 7.91 has also provided the County with a significant cost savings in network hardware.  CallXpress’ new networking architecture includes increased capacity and the elimination of separate digital networking servers for each system location.  In the case of Manatee County, this reduced the number of servers required to run the CallXpress network from eight to five – a substantial cost savings in terms of hardware and ongoing maintenance.

Manatee County officials were first introduced to CallXpress by Southeastern Telecom, Tampa Branch in 2005 when the County was replacing its outdated legacy voice mail platform.  Southeastern Telecom positioned CallXpress as an attractive alternative to Manatee County’s legacy voice mail system.  As a long term AVST reseller, Southeastern Telecom knew that CallXpress would provide the County with the next level of communications functionality while enabling the County to deploy the CallXpress platform’s extensive Unified Communications capabilities at their own pace.

 “CallXpress 7.91 has offered Manatee County the ability to protect their multi-site organization from a catastrophic network communications event, while delivering significant savings in network hardware,” said Denny Michael, AVST’s Vice President of Marketing.  “The Manatee County deployment is a great example of how one government entity has leveraged the latest version of CallXpress to economically enhance their communications network survivability while simultaneously easing the traditional, time consuming burdens of IT administrators.”

About AVST
Applied Voice & Speech Technologies, Inc. (AVST) is a leading developer of communications solutions with over 10 million users that rely on its products and services to maximize their productivity. With nearly 30 years of innovation excellence, AVST is focused on delivering solutions that increase user and business productivity. Its flagship Unified Communications platform, CallXpress®, offers unprecedented interoperability and delivers advanced call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification capabilities. With CallXpress, an organization can protect and extend its existing data and telephony infrastructure investment — now and into the future.

Headquartered in Orange County, Calif., AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Wash. and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices across the United States. AVST's Unified Communications solutions are sold and supported internationally by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. For more information contact Denny Michael, Vice President of Marketing, at 949-699-2300 or access the company's website at www.avst.com.