Avaya Extends Contract With Gold Systems to OEM Vonetix

BOULDER, CO - Gold Systems, an independent provider of voice-powered solutions, announced an addendum to their contract with Avaya (NYSE: AV), to ship Vonetix 3.5 standard on the recently announced Avaya Interactive Response platform. Avaya is a provider of communications networks and services for businesses, including a full suite of contact center solutions. The addendum extends the current contract for an additional two years and expands the OEM agreement to include Vonetix on shipments of Avaya's newest platform, Avaya Interactive Response. "We are thrilled that our contract with Avaya is being expanded to allow our world-class software to be available on Avaya's new mid-market interactive response platform", said Terry Gold, president of Gold Systems. "Vonetix will continue to add value to forward thinking companies looking to lower costs by adding speech recognition to their self-service solutions." Vonetix has shipped standard on the Avaya Interactive Voice Response (IVR, formerly known as CONVERSANT), since May 2000. Vonetix connects databases, enterprise software packages, speech recognition engines and text-to-speech products to IVR platforms. Vonetix enables the IVR to communicate directly with Web sites, eliminating the need for companies to develop and maintain multiple back- and front-end interfaces to applications and databases for voice access to Web data. This functionality lets businesses extend their current Web offerings - including e-commerce, customer service, sales automation and B2B - to customers via voice access, broadening their reach while leveraging their existing infrastructure investments. With Vonetix, customers of interactive voice response platforms can provide more options to help strengthen their own customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives and create effective e-business solutions. According to the September 2001 report entitled "The Voice Business Value Chain", Datamonitor predicts a 43% CAGR for the Voice Services Market. Voice Applications is a large portion of this market (both custom and packaged), which is predicted to be $1.7B by 2006. "Vonetix on the Avaya IVR and Avaya IR platforms gives companies an integration solution for providing telephone access to data for their customers," said Laura Farrelly, vice president of product management for Gold Systems. "What is important is that Vonetix offers a complete infrastructure that speeds development, whether the application is being developed by the company, an ISV or a speech provider. The fact that Vonetix lowers development costs is a real value-add for companies considering the purchase of an Avaya platform." Combined with available plug-in products, Vonetix allows enterprise customers to deploy self-service solutions using standard interface tools that work with their existing legacy systems. Available plug-ins include the JDBC Plug-in, MQSeries Plug-in, Reporting Plug-in, Document Plug-in, TNSeries Plug-in and the newest product AccessTTS that provides a mechanism for integrating TTS with the IVR. "Vonetix has proven to be a popular and valuable tool for our customers who are integrating across various systems and databases," said Diane Shariff, Avaya product manager, Self Service Solutions. "We're pleased to expand the relationship and offer this capability on our newest, IP-enabled platform."