Despite the expectation that the emergence and adoption of unified communications will kill the need for voicemail and unified messaging products, AVST continues to experience mid 20% year over year growth, proving the expectation premature or just plain wrong. With the continued aging of large standalone enterprise-wide voicemail systems from the 1980s and 1990s, in particular Octel systems (now a part of Avaya), many customers are reaching out to AVST to deliver the next generation solution, or at least to implement a replacement that is current and supported. The larger systems in place in universities, government agencies and manufacturing companies for example, have been discontinued and are losing support which creates the opportunity for AVST.
The CallXpress 7.9.1 release offers several network improvements for disparate units to act as one service with easy message forwarding, backup, administrative control and call flow management services. Keeping pace with its role as an enterprise-wide application, the CallXpress offers [[SOAP]]-XML support for Web Services integration and rapid application development and deployment options using the [[Service-oriented architecture]] (SOA).
The integratable capabilities have been available for some time through various well-developed APIs, but are now gaining traction as more IP PBX vendors tout their SOA-orientation (notably Nortel, NEC, Avaya). Voicemail services including auto attendant, messaging, notification, scheduling and the like are not necessarily readily available from the base SOA PBX platforms, or are not available in enterprise-wide packaging.
Tom Minifie, the VP of Product Management at AVST also discussed the whole notification service requirements for enterprise-scale environments. These are important to enable the public safety application in university or local government settings (also large consumers of enterprise-wide, PBX-independent messaging systems). CallXpress allows for outbound SMTP, IVR and SMS communications, but aren't typically designed to support rapid notifications of thousands of users.
