It's hard to imagine how the marketplace has changed in 25 years. Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST announced the company's 25th anniversary yesterday. AVST is the result of a 2003 business combination of Sound Advantage and AVT division of Captaris (NASDAQ: CAPA). Captaris is focused on fax servers and document management systems.
Along with a history of product innovations (first with an Intel-based call processing and voice messaging platform, first with Windows solution and extensive innovations around speech-enabled auto attendant, IVR with messaging, personal assistant) designed for extending the enterprise telephony investment into a personal productivity tool.
AVST has most significantly, built up an extensive reseller network that includes the premier enterprise telephony resellers: BlackBox, Shared Technologies, Ericsson and VerizonBusiness. The independent capabilities of their offering (works with wide array of enterprise IP and legacy telephony equipment vendors) assures a unique and credible market space for them. I would expect though, that the company will continue to feed this channel with new products either bought or made to exploit the integration of communications with business processes.
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