AVST: Centralization and MobilityAVST: Centralization and Mobility

"Customers are really using the network to centralize the application and serve it up."

I'm going to try to spend this week catching up on announcements and interviews from VoiceCon Orlando 2009 that I didn't have time to get posted last week, starting with AVST's announcement of CallXpress 8, the latest iteration of the company's core application platform.AVST has the full treatment on its website, and I also had a chance to talk with CTO Tom Minifie on the show floor last week (video is embedded at the end of this blog). Tom said CallXpress 8 targets two main concerns: Architecture and Mobility.

"When we went out a couple years ago and talked to our customers and our prospective customers, one of the things that really came back to us as a common thread was the desire to centralize solutions, multi-site customers saying, I don't want to have 10 of everything any more," Tom said. "And so they're really using the network to centralize the application and serve it up."

The other key area of focus was on the mobile worker. CallXpress 8 provides speech recognition to provide hands-free management of calls, messages, contacts, calendars, etc. The Personal Assistant application lets users configure call routing and screening, transfer calls from mobile to office phone and vice versa, and handle contacts, schedules, etc.

These features obviously aren't unique to AVST or CallXpress 8, but in our video, I talked with Tom about one of the factors that AVST has been able to leverage over the past few years, namely the fact that legacy voice mail systems are reaching end of life and end of maintenance, and customers are finding they have to make a move, even in a difficult procurement climate.

Given this difficult procurement climate, enterprises may be delaying purchases of entire new communications systems (i.e., IP-PBXs), but they can get some of these new features just in the course of replacing their voice mail with applications like CallXpress 8. "It naturally allows a customer to hold onto [i.e., not replace] a lot of the infrastructure, and replace the application with CallXpress," Tom said.

Here's the video from last week: