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Zultys Licenses the Avistar C3 Media Engine™ – Powering Video for Zultys’ MXIE Unified Communications Desktop

San Mateo, Calif., March 11, 2009 — Avistar Communications Corp. (Nasdaq: AVSR), a leader in unified visual communications solutions, announced today that Zultys, Inc., a leading provider of all-in-one unified communication solutions, will integrate Avistar’s C3 Media Engine and make it available to its customers around the world. Through this agreement, Zultys customers will have the ability to add best-in-class desktop videoconferencing to their unified communications systems. Zultys plans to launch the integrated solution in the fall of 2009.

Simon Moss, CEO of Avistar, said, “After a thorough and competitive review, Zultys selected Avistar. Zultys is recognized for its innovative, open standards IP communications and telephony products. Avistar C3™ will help Zultys open new revenue streams and provide important new videoconferencing features that will strengthen its positioning in its markets worldwide.”

“Videoconferencing provides the ROI our customers are looking for as part of their unified communications solutions, especially in a down economy, where travel is well scrutinized,” said Steve Morrison, Vice President, Product Marketing, Zultys. “Avistar C3 augments our line of VoIP and web conferencing products, empowering our customers to collaborate and take aggressive action to remain competitive.”

Avistar C3 Media Engine
Based on the award-winning Avistar C3 Desktop™ solution, the Avistar C3 Media Engine provides a business class desktop videoconferencing experience to technology partners who require a visual communications experience within their applications. Business-class videoconferencing is recognized as a valuable communications tool that provides corporations serious cost savings, improved productivity and ROI. According to a recent Wainhouse Research study, one third of those polled see the use of videoconferencing accelerating given today’s economy, as it reduces the need and cost for travel plus improves collaboration and decision-making. At a fraction of the cost of typical videoconferencing solutions, Avistar C3 makes videoconferencing easy and approachable for both advanced and novice business users.

About Zultys
Zultys, Inc. is showing what’s possible for Open Standards IP communications and telephony. Its Open Standards IP technology is the building block for its award-winning IP PBX systems. Zultys develops products that enable companies and organizations in more than 110 countries and 19 languages to deploy integrated communications systems. For more information visit: www.zultys.com.

About Avistar Communications Corporation
Avistar (Nasdaq: AVSR) is a unified visual communications solutions, providing proven business-class technology. Avistar’s desktop videoconferencing installations include more than 100,000 committed desktop seats worldwide, bringing together business users anytime and anyplace. Companies such as IBM Corp., Sony Corp., LifeSize Communications, Inc. and Polycom Inc. use Avistar technology to power their unified communications solutions. Avistar works with leading-edge technology partners and resellers including CityIS, Beyondis, Datamart and Fontel in more than 40 countries.

An Insurance Age lead story this week was ‘Brokers warned of telecoms firms mis-selling call-recording devices’.

Insurance brokers are being urged not to fall victim to telecoms firms pitching call-recording equipment on the grounds of regulatory compliance.

Sean Ryan, a director of 500, was asked to comment.  He claimed they were exploiting the vague wording of the regulations, saying: “The FSA had to take a broad-brush approach to ensure it covers businesses that may offer cross-over services.

“However, it is not surprising to hear that some telecommunications companies may be mis-selling call-recording products and services following the FSA’s policy statement. Ignorance of the applicability of the policy may be used as an opportunity for pushing call-recording technology to companies that do not require it.”

Here at 500 you can be assured not only of our knowledge and expertise but also of our integrity and honesty.

The full article can be read at:
insuranceage.com - ‘Brokers warned of telecoms firms mis-selling call-recording devices’.

The Financial Times Advisor’s lead story ‘IFAs Falsely Targeted over FSA Telephone Recording Rules’ stated that IFA firms are being warned to ignore demands from telecommunication firms insisting that new telephone systems costing up to £30,000 must be bought to comply with new Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulation. Owing to our extensive research in this area, Séan Ryan, a director at 500 Limited, was asked to comment, saying “It’s not so surprising to hear that some telecommunications companies may be miss-selling call recording products and services following the FSA’s policy statement. Ignorance regarding the applicability of the policy may be being used as an opportunity to push call recording to companies who do not require it.” Here at 500 you can be assured not only of our knowledge and expertise but also of our integrity and honesty.

The full FT article can be read at:
FT Advisor.com: ‘IFAs falsely targeted over FSA telephone recording rules’

A Scalable Web Conferencing & Collaboration Solution

Zultys Inc. today announced MXmeeting™, a next-generation collaboration solution that combines voice, desktop web interaction, instant messaging, virtual meeting rooms, online presentations, training and demo’s all with easy-to-use controls. When you’re ready to get work done MXmeeting™ is ready to connect you with other participants wherever the internet reaches. MXmeeting™ builds on Zultys’ premier IP-PBX portfolio which already supports integrated call handling, voice mail, gateways, presence server, and instant messaging server for up to 10,000 users. Both PC and Mac client devices are supported.

MXmeeting™ scales as you grow. The solution starts with as few as 2 meeting rooms with 10 concurrent users (M200) and grows to as many as 200 meeting rooms with 2000 concurrent users (M1000).

Web conferencing
For sales presentations, product demos, online training, and interactive collaboration;

Remote Support
For remote control of your customers’ PC or Mac desktops, with remote reboot and file transfer;

Remote Access
For access to your office or home computers from anywhere, anytime; and

Web seminars
Requiring no download of any kind by your attendees, guaranteeing attendance in 5 seconds with any kind of Internet browser, including iPhone. Free audio conferencing service is included. Full customization and quick integration with your websites and applications are featured. No IT maintenance is needed. You own it. You control it.

MS Outlook Integration
Using an interface that is broadly used with Enterprises, MXmeeting™ naturally integrates with Microsoft Outlook for scheduling and communication.

MXIE Integration
MXmeeting ™ is integrated with MXIE, Zultys’ industry leading unified communications client.

Reliability
Building on an embedded LINUX platform, MXmeeting™ fits smoothly into the Enterprise reliability requirements. The system’s web-based management and report interface makes it simple and easy to administer.

Recording
A natural extension to Zultys’ existing Call Recording offering, MXmeeting™ interactions can be captured for future playback and sharing.

Zultys MXmeeting™ is available by simply adding an appliance to an existing MX250 or MX30 offering. Eliminating expensive audio and web conferencing services renders immediate expense reductions.

Pricing and Availability
Please contact us on 0845 0000 500 for further information on pricing and availability.

For further information, also go to www.zultys.com/webconferencing. Zultys have a good feature comparison table.

This new product has caused quite a stir in the industry with larger news agencies like Reuters also carrying the story of this exciting development.

500 Limited are delighted to announce that SA Law, a leading and innovative UK law firm, are now live with their new on-premises IP PBX system.

All 75 users have been fully trained to use their new Aastra 53i and phones and the extensive features of their new IP telephony system.

Legal firms must be able to demonstrate that partners are able to view all faxes – prior to our implementation this would have been a manual, time-consuming and paper-based process. Now though, faxes may be sent, received and viewed via PC: it’s automatic and inexpensive – and simply demonstrated to the regulatory body in real time.

Take the opportunity of building on our recent success and let us know how we can meet your business needs. Call us on 0845 0000 500.

Perhaps your business has made the decision to upgrade to a premises-based IP telephony system. The question is: which route is best, proprietary or open source? Does your business choose a well-established supplier of proprietary IP PBXs or is it attracted to the often cheaper and more reactive route of an open source IP PBX? How important is the underlying hardware and software upon which your telephone calls will be made and received?

First we need to consider what is meant by ’open source’ in the context of IP PBX systems, so let us take an example: word processing applications, such Windows Word or Mac Pages, are proprietary applications as are nearly all the applications that a business will use on a day to day basis. That is, the behind-the-scenes source code cannot be amended in order to allow the implementation of any new features that may be required. This is an advantage is many ways as it is not often wise to allow anyone to amend software in this way – and therefore subsequently be responsible for retesting and supporting the amended version – as could be done if these applications were ’open source’. In other ways it may be a disadvantage, for example if a business really must amend the way an application works in order to suit special needs, this is not always possible when the software application is proprietary. In addition, as the development of open source systems is undertaken by a wide variety of people with a range of skill levels, and as open source software can run on relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware, open source systems can be cheap. It’s a similar story for telephone systems: the operating system that controls an IP PBX’s may be amended, tweaked or re-written by anyone who chooses to do so – ‘open source’ – or alternatively, by design, it may not be modified – ‘proprietary’.

Open source IP PBX systems such as those based upon Asterisk, of which Digium-based systems have the lion share, have made some headway into the IP PBX arena. Although reputable proprietary systems often have a surfeit of functionality required by most businesses – such as click-to-dial, sophisticated in-bound call routing, automatic pop-up of CRM client details and the ability to make calls simultaneously via a number of interfaces – there is sometimes a need for businesses to tailor their telephone system in business-specific, non-standard ways. Or perhaps a business is forced to make cost the primary factor. So there can be a real and valid reasons to consider open source systems.

However, few open source systems are adequately able to support small to medium-sized businesses - certainly those who deem telephony as ‘mission-critical’ - as few systems can be scaled to cater for larger enterprises. Perhaps most important of all, fewer still can stand up to being rigorously tested and it’s often a challenge to obtain meaningful information on testing regimes and mean time between failure rates. In common with other open source applications, Asterisk-based systems are developed by a number of varying companies: there may be some advantages to this approach but these must be contrasted by the fact that no one system has significant enough market exposure to a large customer base over a protracted period of time. This can result in coding errors and security vulnerabilities remaining undiscovered and users finding themselves beta testers for what they may have been lead to believe were tested and released implementations.

For those businesses who feel they really must consider a highly-bespoke and non-standard telephony implementation it should be borne in mind that building and programming an Asterisk IP PBX is not for the faint-hearted; few businesses have the expertise to build a system in-house and so opt to purchase from Asterisk suppliers. In turn a robust support contract is needed which means making sure that the supplier that provides the Asterisk system is ’solid’ and will be around for the duration in order to provide any support you may require. Owing to the nature of open source systems there is rarely the option to rely on the back-up of a distributor or manufacturer. In addition, there are platform issues to consider: not every business runs Windows or uses PC’s.

Our best of breed premises-based IP PBX system from Zultys, however, provides client software that can run on a PC, a Mac OS X and Linux environment. This - coupled with the functionality, robustness and scalability that Zultys provide and their longevity and their many years of experience in IP telephony - makes Zultys our premises-based IP PBX system of choice. Long established since 2002 and developed in America’s Silicon Valley, Zultys are the best kept telephony secret in Europe!

Ask yourself this: would you be happy knowing that the software of the plane you’re flying on has potentially been amended by anyone when your life, and the life of everyone on the plane, depends upon its correct functioning? Or would you prefer for it to have been designed and tested by the manufacturer who built the plane? It is an extreme example perhaps but a parallel can be drawn here: telephone calls are often life-blood of a business.

Inexorably then, there seems to be a logical draw back to proprietary IP PBX systems, placing the open source systems to one side. Here at 500 we have considered open-source PBX systems - and we’ll continue to monitor the progress of Asterisk-based PBX systems and other emerging open-source IP PBX solutions - but of the three we have reviewed, all were ultimately found wanting. So, we must state that we believe that current open-source offerings do not truly provide mission critical business-grade telephony.

To find out further information on why or to talk to us on any other matter, please don’t hesitate to call us on 0845 0000 500.

The migration to IP telephony continues. Synergy Research Group has reported, for Q1 2008, that traditional PBX sales are decreasing as IP telephony becomes more attractive to the SMB market.

The worldwide enterprise telephony market is growing 4.0% year-on-year, with the fast growing segments being IP phones (14.8%) and enterprise IP telephony (11.7%).

Many small and medium businesses are realising the benefit of migrating to an IP telephony solution: they are able to consolidate their voice and data networks, consolidate their personnel across many sites and gain a greater competitive presence through the feature-rich functions available through IP telephony.

If you are thinking about migrating your business telephony then please refer to our products and services sections or simply call us on 0845 0000 800.

Smartest IP Phone System Graduates with 4.0

Graduation time is a major milestone in the life of a student, and Zultys Technologies, the premier developer and manufacturer of pure SIP communication solutions, is very pleased today to announce that it has reached a significant milestone of its own.

Zultys, the company that brought the first pure-SIP, standalone communications solution to the marketplace back in 2002, now marks the commencement of a new era of interoperability and productivity with the arrival of MX Software Version 4.0. As the powerful backbone of the award-winning flagship line of Media eXchange (MX) servers - the MX250 and MX30 - this new build offers a feature-rich class of integrated services and opens the door of the Zultys platform to world-class manufacturers such as Polycom and Aastra Telecom.

“We believe this release speaks volumes about the power of the MX systems. It clearly defines our corporate strategy to implement technical developments and innovative engineering to gain mindshare in the SMB space,” said Vladimir Movshovich, VP of Technology, Zultys Technologies.

ZIP 5xi Integration

The pinnacle of v4.0’s improvements is full integration and support of Zultys’ new ZIP 5xi line of advanced SIP-based IP phones and expansion modules. Designed and engineered by Aastra Telecom, the new ZIP 5xi line is the perfect complement to the MX30 and MX250 systems:

• ZIP 51i - 3 Line x 16 Character display, 1 call appearance with transfer capability
• ZIP 53i - 3 Line x 16 Character display, 6 programmable keys, 9 call appearances
• ZIP 55i - 144 x 75 pixel backlit LCD, 6 soft keys & 6 programmable keys, 9 call appearances
• ZIP 57i - 144 x 128 pixel backlit LCD, 30 programmable keys, 12 soft keys, 9 call appearances
• ZIP 57i CT - As per ZIP 57i plus integrated W-DECT cordless handset
• ZIP 536M - Expansion module with 36 programmable keys, LED status indication
• ZIP 560M - Expansion module with 60 programmable keys, LCD based labels, LED status indication

Integrated features include:

• Multiple line/call appearance keys with in-use LED indications
• Comprehensive Busy Lamp Field (BLF) support
• Programmable function keys
• Intuitive, user-centric screen menus
• Full duplex conference quality hands-free operation
• Built-in headset jack
• Multi-key expansion modules available
• Embedded XML browser
• Full GUI-based configuration via MX Administrator
• Supports 802.3af Power over Ethernet (PoE) and AC wall adapter
• Provisioning, Park, Pickup, Page and Busy Lamp Field (BLF) operation

Additional Features and Enhancements

Version 4.0 also offers increased functionality for the remote user. For example, administrators and supervisors now have the ability to assign users from the most remote MX systems to any local group, enabling inbound call centers or operators to offload peak calling volumes or extend work hours across multiple time zones.

Version 4.0 also enhances the integration between its MXIE UI and Microsoft Outlook, enabling increased unified communications based on with this widely used email client. System control can now be shared between the MXIE interface and the phone itself through enhanced DTMF operations. Mac support is expanded to improve interoperability with new Intel-powered Mac clients.

Press release by Zultys, 14/05/08.
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