In 1995-2000 the industry was convinced that unified messaging was going to immediately sweep the corporate desktop. The whole idea of uniting fax, voicemail and e-mail together made too much sense to not happen quickly. Sometimes logic and what you think is common sense just doesn't happen and now we live in a world where a $10/month VoIP service provider can give you unified messaging and most enterprise users still don't have it.

My take? The advent of VoIP service providers will make corporate executives wonder why they can't have the flexibility of UM in the office yet their $10/month service offers it. In other words there is room for growth in the market.

One of the largest players in the UM market has always been AVST. They are truly a pioneer in the unified messaging market and they recently launched a new version of their flagship unified communications solution, CallXpress 7.71. This release features increased port capacity and enhanced user interfaces. The new features found in CallXpress 7.71 are specifically developed for enterprise-size companies actively seeking to replace their first generation communications infrastructure. How big is big? How about 20,000 users on a single site configuration. This feature alone arms a large volume enterprise with the capacity necessary to support its entire employee base and at the same time requires less hardware to administer. I am sure you can fry an egg on this baby.

It is nice to see the company is still doing well. I have been covering them for about a decade or so and obviously the need for this sort of Fortune-class solution seems to be increasing.