Applied Voice & Speech Technologies has selected Neverfail to ensure remote disaster recovery and high availability for CallXpress 8.1, the latest version of AVST's (News - Alert) communications platform.

With Neverfail, a software company specializing in continuous availability and disaster recovery, AVST provides CallXpress 8.1 users with protection from interrupted access and downtime.

CallXpress is a unified communications platform that has diverse applications such as call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech and notification.

Not having the protection may result in loss of productivity and revenue, the companies said.

'Neverfail protects against downtime of the AVST system server,' said Andrew Barnes, senior vice president of corporate development for Neverfail. 'Should the system server fail, for example a due to operating system, hardware or disk failure, Neverfail will ensure that CallXpress 8.1 continues to run with full functionality. The same applies if the system server needs to be taken down for maintenance or perhaps is taken down by a power failure.'

In the case of server going down, Neverfail automatically switches all system server functionality over to an alternative system server so that all CallXpress functionality remains available. Once the primary server is working again it changes back, without the end user even being aware of the failure.

Or, if there are a series of failures, such as an application failure and a power outage, users will retain their ability to make and answer calls, and retrieve their voicemail messages. If the secondary or tertiary server is called into use, the system automatically starts 'failover' operations transparently across the three servers, eliminating all failure scenarios, and guarding against expensive downtime and maintaining continuous user access. In addition, Neverfail manages the synchronization between the sites, enabling seamless switchback when the primary systems are restored, so users do not even notice the transition, the company said.

AVST previously selected Neverfail's technology to ensure continuous availability for email and voicemail for CallXpress 8.

'Businesses depend on their IT systems, so when things go wrong, the impact is often catastrophic,' Barnes said. 'In today's fast-paced economy any downtime is unacceptable and organizations need to be disaster resilient. Any downtime of the unified communications platform can have severe impact. Customer orders can be lost and reputation be damaged quite apart from productivity losses.'

Barnes cited data from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration that said 80 percent of companies without well-conceived data protection and recovery strategies go out of business within two years of a major disaster.

In addition to AVST, Neverfail also has an original equipment manufacturer partnership with VMware. Similar OEM agreements are in place with Entuity and Honeywell (News - Alert).

In a related matter, Neverfail recently rolled out a new product for the Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint Server 2010. Its release coincides with the release of SharePoint 2010.