Unified Communications Comes to AVST CallXpress 8.0

With a rich legacy of 20 years of voice messaging and unified messaging, along with speech technologies (see my blog about speech technologies in Release 8.0) AVST debut their latest release of their flagship product, CallXpress, and added unified communications functionality. AVST did this a part of a platform refresh which enabled them to bring speech onto the platform, rather than having to use two separate platforms, and added internal “presence” to the system. Release 8 takes a multi-server approach as a single platform, for costs savings, high availability and business continuity. Scalable up to 384 ports and 40K users, CallXpress 8.0 call servers combine unified messaging, voice messaging, IVR, auto-attendant, personal assistant, and speech recognition and the system server provides a centralized database, administration and message store.

Of interest are their personal assistant type capabilities that incorporate presence-based find-me-follow-me functions that are speech-enabled. Users of Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes can create and manage schedules and contacts through the web, a smartphone, desk top of phone interface, and when it comes to the later, hands-free by voice. In the future, AVST will be linking this internal presence capability with presence capabilities in other UC offerings, such as OCS and Sametime.

AVST has partnered with neverfail for business continuity, providing fully synchronized hot standby with automatic failover. They have also partnered with Unimax for single point of administration for CallXpress and PBX systems, making it so that users or distribution lists can be added and administered in one place and remain consistent across PBX, voicemail, email, etc.

This is a significant advancement because it provides AVST’s vast installed base of users with unified communications capabilities that they might not over wise have gotten without jumping ship to another UC provider. In particular, considering that AVST has a huge installed base of SMB customers, this will move them to the next step of unified communications, while allowing AVST time to continue to bolster their unified communications feature set.