Amtel gives old phone systems modern partner

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Auckland telecommunications distributor Amtel Communications says the latest version of Active Technologies' Unity unified messaging system will help companies run internet protocol (IP) phones alongside traditional PBX networks.

"Users want the cost savings of IP phones but they don't want to throw out investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in PBX infrastructure," said Amtel international marketing director Steve Oswald. "Now we can drop our application in and it will work in both worlds."

Mr Oswald said Unity Enterprise 2.4, which runs as a Microsoft Exchange application, now integrated with Call Manager 3.0 software running on Cisco routers.

That enabled all PBX and IP voice calls, fax and e-mail messages to be channelled into a single Outlook mailbox on the users' desktop.

Active Voice Technologies IP telephony international sales manager Martin Otterson said voice messages were stored as "Wav" files, which could be played through the phone, or forwarded as an attachment to an e-mail.

Unlike conventional voicemail, the recipient could jump to any part of the message, or forward it as an attachment to an e-mail.

Mr Otterson said that represented a big productivity gain for call centres now transcribing the contents of voice messages and re-sending them as text e-mail.

The Unity package, which costs about $20,000, includes a web interface that allows users to control call forwarding to their mobile or other numbers, as well as a text-to-speech system that will read out e-mails over the phone.

"It won't read your attachments but it could fax them to your hotel where you can then read them for $12 a page," Mr Otterson joked.

Microsoft Windows platform marketing manager Jay Templeton said Exchange was the most popular messaging platform in New Zealand, with 3000 exchange server licences and 100,000 client access licences sold.

He said Microsoft-commissioned researcher Phoenix Research last year gave Exchange 33 per cent of the messaging application market, ahead of Lotus Notes/Domino and Netscape Mail, both with 8 per cent, and Novell's Groupwise, with 5 per cent.