2012 Global Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Customer Value Enhancement Award

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1 2011 South African Data Centre Green Excellence Award in Technology Innovation Cybernest Global Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Customer Value Enhancement Award 2011 Frost & Sullivan 1 We Accelerate Growth

2 Customer Value Enhancement Award Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Global, 2012 Frost & Sullivan s Global Research Platform Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The company s research philosophy originates with the CEO s 360-Degree Perspective, which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research methodology. This unique approach enables us to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best Practices research, Frost & Sullivan is proud to present the 2012 Global Customer Value Enhancement Award in Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging to AVST. Significance of the Customer Value Enhancement Award Key Industry Challenges Addressed by Superior Customer Initiatives Frost & Sullivan independent analysis reveals that competitors in the enterprise voice and unified messaging market face a number of unique challenges in their pursuit of success and long-term growth. First and foremost, while the voice mailbox is considered a requirement for most businesses, actual usage of voice messaging has declined in favor of , instant messaging, and other communications choices. Because of this combination of sheer ubiquity of voic and the perception of its diminished value in the enterprise, voice and unified messaging (UM) solutions are increasingly treated as commodity products, with aggressive pricing and bundling driving margins and revenue to rock bottom. Furthermore, the enterprise voice and unified messaging market is largely dominated by end-to-end unified communications (UC) vendors, which present UM solutions as merely one component of a larger UC platform. The end-to-end solution providers can offer customers very cost-effective license bundles, which lower the value of each individual application within the bundle. This bundling causes particular challenges for the standalone or best-of-breed competitors, who not only have to compete on price and value, but also must prove enough differentiation to overcome the compelling integration argument of UC single suite competitors. Finally, the voice and unified messaging market, as well as the broader unified communications marketplace, are not immune to global economic conditions. Business decision makers report to Frost & Sullivan that the downward shifts in the economy cause hesitation and slow adoption of modern unified communication platforms as businesses consider more flexible alternatives, such as hosted or cloud-based UC solutions Frost & Sullivan 1 We Accelerate Growth

3 A strong focus on customer value enhancement can help a leading participant in the voice and unified messaging market to address many of these challenges. The customer value enhancement leader can address the perception problems related to voic by delivering advanced solutions with compelling functionality that demonstrate the benefits of unified messaging to today s highly mobile workforce. Furthermore, a unified messaging vendor with a focus on customer value enhancement has typically identified the specific needs of its customers and is delivering voice and unified messaging solutions tailored to those needs, creating essential differentiation for its products. Finally, Frost & Sullivan notes that the leader in customer value enhancement can identify key market trends and evolving customer buying patterns. With this invaluable insight into shifting paradigms, this market participant can adjust its products and strategies to adapt to a changing marketplace. Best Practice Award Analysis for AVST The Frost & Sullivan Customer Value Enhancement Award is presented each year 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. This 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. AVST s Performance in the Enterprise Voice and Unified Messaging Market AVST saw growth in both user licenses and revenue for its enterprise voice and unified messaging products in 2011, through both organic growth and acquisition, which placed it among the top five competitors in terms of revenue (per Frost & Sullivan independent analysis). Frost & Sullivan is of the opinion that this accomplishment is particularly noteworthy, as AVST is the only pure-play voice and unified messaging vendor to make the top-five list, beating several of the end-to-end UC vendors in terms of seat licenses shipped. Also important, 2011 marked two consecutive years of growth for AVST an achievement bolstered by the acquisition of ActiveVoice in 2010 and long-term strategic technology relationship with NEC Corporation of America (NEC). Key Performance Drivers for AVST AVST s success in the voice and unified messaging market is derived from several key factors. The company has found success in the market by selling its own best-of-breed mobile, voice and business process applications and by providing its technologies to strategic OEM partners to develop their own products and solutions. Likewise, its current voice and unified messaging product lineup includes options to address the small-business, 2012 Frost & Sullivan 2 We Accelerate Growth

4 enterprise, and the emerging cloud-based segments. Finally, tight interoperability, integration, and scalability enable AVST to offer customers the advantages of centralized voice and unified messaging without the need to upgrade their entire unified communications IT infrastructure. Factor 1: Strong Focus on Customer Business Needs As a pure-play voice and unified messaging vendor in a market that is predominantly composed of end-to-end unified communications vendors, AVST offers a distinct alternative to the all-encompassing solutions of its competitors. AVST s focus on adding customer value extends beyond delivering differentiated messaging solutions. AVST also provides its UCConnect API framework to enable developers to rapidly create unique custom applications to accelerate business processes.. Through Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), businesses can tie in communication with information, to help streamline their processes. By leveraging capabilities within the CX-Series, 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 and more. AVST not only provides programmatic access to its UC applications, but the UCConnect program builds a developer network to provide guidance and resources to ensure integration and applications success.. As an independent solution vendor, AVST also offers its CX-Series platforms to other leading unified communications providers,. These OEM agreements not only offer AVST an alternate path to market, but can garner additional customer and market insight that the company may not have been able to gather from within its own customer base. Factor 2: Multiple Deployment Options AVST s goal is to serve customers across the entire spectrum, from SMBs to the largest of service providers. Its CX-Series of mobile, voice and business process applications offers extensive interoperability, resiliency and tiers of scalability. CX-S is a turnkey IP-enabled UC solution directed at small businesses. CX-E is ideal for enterprises seeking to deploy UC in a rapidly evolving IT landscape, through its extensive interoperability, and CX-C was specifically designed to be cloud-ready from the start, delivering a rich communications, multi-tenant UC platform. AVST also supports diversity in deployment options, embracing a hybrid model that allows 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 best align with their particular geographical and organizational makeup. This combination of scalability and deployment diversity enables AVST to fit itself into any unified communications environment, as well as provide room for businesses to grow within 2012 Frost & Sullivan 3 We Accelerate Growth

5 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, voic , fax, notification and other business process integration capabilities.. Factor 3: Superior Interoperability and Integration AVST provides its customers with greater flexibility by leveraging their existing call-control platforms, including legacy PBXs. Thus, AVST ensures that its solutions are aligned with its customers broader business objectives. Frost & Sullivan firmly believes that AVST has succeeded in delivering such differentiated value through deeper interactions and closer relationships with customers when benchmarked against other market participants. While competitors in the voice and unified messaging market extend UM support to their own legacy or heritage systems, AVST designed its UC solutions from the ground-up to support and interoperate with hundreds of third-party voice systems, including legacy TDM-based PBXs. This level of support not only allows AVST to offer standalone UM solutions without a total UC deployment, but also adds particular value to businesses that have heterogeneous or disparate call-control systems in multiple locations. The integration capabilities of AVST s UC solutions offer the greatest customer value enhancement, as they enable businesses to move forward, without the expensive infrastructure forklift required in a full UC deployment. Conclusion AVST adds customer value by letting customers deploy its products in the way that best fits their needs and current communications environments. Rather than forcing customers into large-scale infrastructure upgrades, AVST enables businesses to leverage their existing voice platforms, while nicely realizing the benefits of unified messaging and a centralized voice messaging solution and other next generation UC mobile, voice and business process applications. Frost & Sullivan is therefore quite pleased to present AVST with the 2012 Global Customer Value Enhancement Award Frost & Sullivan 4 We Accelerate Growth

6 The CEO 360-Degree Perspective TM - Visionary Platform for Growth Strategies The CEO 360-Degree Perspective model provides a clear illustration of the complex business universe in which CEOs and their management teams live today. It represents the foundation of Frost & Sullivan's global research organization and provides the basis on which companies can gain a visionary and strategic understanding of the market. The CEO 360-Degree Perspective is also a must-have requirement for the identification and analysis of best-practice performance by industry leaders. The CEO 360-Degree Perspective model enables our clients to gain a comprehensive, action-oriented understanding of market evolution and its implications for their companies growth strategies. As illustrated in Chart 5 below, the following six-step process outlines how our researchers and consultants embed the CEO 360-Degree Perspective into their analyses and recommendations. CEO's 360-Degree Perspective Model 2012 Frost & Sullivan 5 We Accelerate Growth

7 Critical Importance of TEAM Research Frost & Sullivan s TEAM Research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all seven of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Our experience has shown over the years that companies too often make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Frost & Sullivan contends that successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. In that vein, the letters T, E, A and M reflect our core technical, economic, applied (financial and best practices) and market analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the TEAM Research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry players and for creating high-potential growth strategies for our clients. Chart 3: Benchmarking Performance with TEAM Research About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best-practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit Frost & Sullivan 6 We Accelerate Growth