AVST Takes a Leap Forward with NEC Deal

Yesterday, April 5, 2010, AVST announced a “long term strategic relationship” with NEC by which AVST will become the producer of the voice messaging (VM) and unified messaging (UM) products offered by both companies, with a continuing investment roadmap for unified communications (UC) enhancements to the product lines. Effectively, this is the acquisition of the NEC Active Voice product lines by AVST accompanied by a long term supplier agreement from AVST to NEC. The press release points to 140,000 systems sold to date, worldwide, through the two extensive distributor networks, making this alliance a notable leader in the voice messaging and unified messaging category.  

This appears to be a great move for both companies and for their channels and customers. Let’s look at two dimensions:

1. VM and UM: Customers continue to need Voice Messaging and Unified Messaging. Essentially, every enterprise and small/mid-sized business (SMB) uses one or more messaging systems to serve incoming callers and to answer both incoming and internal calls when the called party is busy or unavailable. In some companies, these systems also provide call routing to the called party’s mobile device or other location, for optimal customer service levels or transaction completion rates.  

Advances are continuing in VM and UM, both by AVST and in the industry at large. Speech command interfaces enable mobile users to access voice messages and even e-mail, contacts and calendars with simple speech commands, for safer, hands-free operation. Unified Messaging places the voice messages in the e-mail in-box so that the user can see them  from either a PC or their mobile device (BlackBerry or other e-mail reader), to enhance notification options and enable better responsiveness and shorter transaction times. 

2. UC: Essentially every supplier in the traditional voice communications industry, including the VM and UM sector, seeks to deliver Unified Communications products, even solutions. Certainly, AVST has been pushing in this direction for some time. To date, the emphasis has been on enhancements to VM and UM as described above. Yet, there is significant potential for the even stronger AVST team to develop and/or package UC functionality into their products. 

It may be possible for AVST to capture a new growth vector if they can provide UC solutions and applications that are not usually packaged with SMB, or even enterprise, communications systems. Also, it may be possible that a UC refresh of an installed VM or UM system is possible solely using some future AVST product packages, rather than requiring a company to upgrade their key system or PBX or to install separate products and servers in order to capture UC benefits.

Customers, of course, stand to benefit in both categories. Since AVST has a very feature-rich messaging system that supports multiple PBXs, multiple sites, and multiple message store methods (VM as well as UM with Exchange and Domino), the NEC customers will have even better investment options. And, in the UC category, AVST has more development resources to deliver new value for both the AVST and NEC customer sets.

In summary, it looks like a good move. Of course, there are always challenges in integrations of two companies and two product lines, but AVST was formed by the merger of AVT and Sound Advantage under guidance of the same executive leadership team, so there’s good reason to expect they will pull this one off, too. Best wishes.