[November 24, 2004]

Artisoft Introduces TeleVantage Enterprise Manager

BY JOHANNE TORRES

Building upon the growing need for corporations to converge their telecommunication systems, Artisoft (news - alert) announced the TeleVantage Enterprise Manager, the company’s newest addition to the TeleVantage product family. Artisoft developed the new system to enable business clients to connect distributed, multi-site locations into a single, unified telephone system. The company plans to make the new system available as early as next month from Artisoft’s global channel of authorized Solution Providers.

TeleVantage Enterprise Manager was developed to unite employees across an entire organization seamlessly—regardless of location, so they can communicate as if they were located in the same building.

With TeleVantage Enterprise Manager, businesses with multiple locations can:

• Know if any employee is on the phone, on vacation or in a meeting—regardless of their physical location. TeleVantage Enterprise Manager extends the TeleVantage ViewPoint, the system’s desktop graphical interface, to show the phone and personal status of any remote user. With a single view of the entire organization’s availability, employees can also point and click to “camp-on” any busy remote extension so they are automatically called back and connected when the extension becomes free.
• Forward or send voice messages to anyone in the enterprise using the phone or TeleVantage ViewPoint. TeleVantage Enterprise Manager automatically distributes voice messages among TeleVantage Servers as needed, and users have access to multi-site distribution lists.
• Identify and handle VIP calls appropriately, no matter which office location is called. TeleVantage Enterprise Manager automatically configures inter-office call routing over VoIP to eliminate long-distance toll charges between distributed locations.
• Provide centralized IVR applications that can be accessed by any office.

The TeleVantage Enterprise Manager seems to accomplish the true meaning of “presence”—one of the most popular reasons behind adopting VoIP-enabled telecommunication systems in a corporate environment. Artisoft says TeleVantage Enterprise Manager reduces the administrative costs of distributed phone systems by automatically configuring and managing connections between TeleVantage servers.

“TeleVantage Enterprise Manager enables businesses with multiple offices across town or around the globe to unify their operations into a single, networked organization,” said Lee Schlenger, TeleVantage product manager at Artisoft. “Now even more businesses can benefit from the ability of TeleVantage to improve customer service and increase productivity.”

TeleVantage Enterprise Manager was developed to let administrators control which information is copied across all servers and which stays local to a specific server with just a point and click. The system automatically configures TeleVantage servers so they can communicate over VoIP and automatically propagates dial plan changes to every Server in the TeleVantage domain. The system’s Active Directory Synchronization Service automatically imports users into TeleVantage and updates user properties as they change in the Active Directory.

Today’s announcement follows Artisoft’s two months old recent acquisition of Vertical Networks, a provider of software-based IP-PBX and call center products—a move that united two IP-PBX provider powerhouses. The company also announced the closing of a $27.5 million financing, led by Boston-based private equity firm M/C Venture Partners. Artisoft paid $19 million in cash for Vertical Networks, and a portion of the proceeds of the financing were used to finance the acquisition.

Artisoft, Inc.
www.artisoft.com