Frost & Sullivan Recognizes AVST for its Best of Breed Voice and Unified Messaging Solutions that Allow Customers to Retain their Existing Communications Infrastructure

-- Recipient of the Global 2012 Customer Value Enhancement Award

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Based on its recent analysis of all the top revenue generators of the enterprise voice and unified messaging market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes AVST with the Global 2012 Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Enhancement. AVST enables customers to deploy its voice and unified messaging products in the way that best fits their communications environments. AVST 's industry leading interoperability enables businesses to leverage their existing and future voice platforms, while simultaneously deploying next-generation unified communications (UC) mobile, voice and business process applications.

AVST's organic growth and acquisition strategies helped it increase its user licenses and made it the only pure-play vendor to be included in the list of top-five revenue generators. The company sells its own best of breed mobile, voice and business process applications, and offers its technologies to strategic OEM partners to develop their own products and solutions. Its current product lineup includes options to address the small business, enterprise, and the emerging cloud-based segments.

AVST aims to serve customers across the spectrum, from small and medium businesses to the largest service providers. Its CX-Series of mobile, voice and business process applications offers extensive interoperability, resilience and tiers of scalability. The CX-S is a turnkey, IP-enabled UC solution directed at small businesses; the CX-E is ideal for enterprises seeking to deploy UC in a rapidly evolving IT landscape; and the CX-C is specifically designed to be cloud-ready from the start, delivering a rich communications, multi-tenant UC platform.

"AVST provides a UCConnect® API framework to assist developers to rapidly create unique custom applications to accelerate business processes," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Michael Brandenburg. "By leveraging capabilities within the CX-E/S unified communications platform, AVST enables custom application, such as automatic outbound notifications, information access and delivery around the clock, click-to-call from directories and Web portals." AVST not only provides programmatic access to its UC applications, but the UCConnect program builds a developer network to offer guidance and resources to ensure integration and applications success. As an independent solution vendor, AVST also makes available its CX-Series platforms to other leading UC providers. These OEM agreements present AVST with an alternate path to market, as well as garner additional customer and market insight outside of its own customer base.

AVST adopts a hybrid model that comprises a mix of on-premises equipment alongside private or public cloud services. This level of diversity provides compelling value to customers, as more businesses look to right-size their UC infrastructure to align it with their particular geographical and organizational makeup.

This combination of scalability and deployment diversity allows AVST to fit itself into any UC environment, as well as create room for businesses to grow within their product lines. As customers' needs evolve, AVST can deliver an array of applications, including mobile clients, unified messaging, speech-enabled personal assistant and automated attendant, call processing, voicemail, fax, notification and other business process integration capabilities.

AVST gives customers greater flexibility by leveraging their existing call-control platforms, including legacy PBXs. It has succeeded in delivering differentiated value through deeper interactions and closer relationships with customers when benchmarked against other market participants. AVST designed its UC solutions from the ground-up to support and interoperate with hundreds of third-party voice systems, including legacy time division multiplexing (TDM)-based private branch exchanges (PBXs), Centrex and IP-PBX.

"The high level of interoperability not only allows AVST to offer stand-alone unified messaging solutions without a total UC deployment, but also adds particular value to businesses that have heterogeneous or disparate call-control systems in multiple locations," noted Brandenburg. "The integration capabilities of AVST's UC solutions facilitate the provision of centralized voice and unified messaging, without the expensive infrastructure forklift required in a full UC deployment."

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in implementing strategies that proactively create value for its customers with a focus on improving the return on the investment that customers make in its services or products. The award recognizes the company's inordinate focus on enhancing the value that its customers receive, beyond simply good customer service, leading to improved customer retention and, ultimately, customer base expansion.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

About AVST

The typical enterprise communications infrastructure is made up of a collection of technologies from multiple vendors, acquired over time and never intended to work together. To maximize user and business productivity, while leveraging existing IT investments, interoperability is a must.

AVST delivers the industry's most interoperable Unified Communications (UC) platform that brings best-of-breed voice, mobility and business process solutions to the enterprise. Unlike virtually every other UC vendor, AVST does not constrain customers with a single vendor lock-in approach. In fact, it's the very opposite. By connecting new and existing technologies, AVST frees organizations from the constraints of a closed, single-source UC solution, unlocking the full potential of their communications infrastructure.

With over 15 million users worldwide and three decades of innovation excellence, AVST is unifying communications®.

Headquartered in Orange County, California, AVST maintains facilities in Seattle, Washington, Victoria B.C., Canada and the United Kingdom and has remote sales offices throughout the United States. AVST's UC solutions are sold and supported worldwide by an extensive network of resellers and OEM partners. To learn more about AVST, our products and partners, please visit www.avst.com or you can follow us at Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

About Frost & Sullivan

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Contact:

Mireya Espinoza
P:+1-210- 247-3870
F: +1-210-348-1003
E: mireya.espinoza@frost.com

AVST Contact:

Kevin Mayberry
Lages & Associates
+1-949-453-8080
kevin@lages.com

SOURCE Frost & Sullivan