Lehman Brothers Selects Metreos to Speed Development and Deployment of IP Telephony Applications

Business Wire, Feb 8, 2005

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Metreos Unveils Solution That Empowers the Enterprise to Improve Critical Business Processes with Applications That Leverage Converged Voice and Data Networks

Metreos Corporation, which provides a unique communications application environment (CAE) that enables enterprises to gain value from their IP telephony investment, announced today at VoiceCon that Lehman Brothers is using the Metreos Communications Application Environment (CAE). The company is using the Metreos CAE to build and deploy, across the organization, productivity-enhancing applications that seamlessly integrate voice and data.

Philip Palevo, VP of Network Engineering, Lehman Brothers is presenting a session at VoiceCon on Wednesday, February 9, at 12:00 p.m. EST in the America's Seminar Room on the Ballroom Level of the Walt Disney World Dolphin Hotel, discussing how his company was able to leverage the Metreos CAE to improve employee productivity and reduce costs.

"We conducted an extensive review of vendors that would help us to better leverage our IP infrastructure and build and deploy applications over our VoIP network," said Palevo. "In the end, we chose Metreos based on the stability of its run-time environment, ease of integration with our VoIP deployment and the speed with which we could develop applications. With Metreos, we were also able to easily scale applications up to hundreds of users with the click of a button. This platform is helping us get more value out of our IP telephony system with minimal ramp up time."

Lehman Brothers has deployed a number of productivity-enhancing IP applications across its organization, utilizing the Metreos CAE:

--VoiceTunnel provides enhanced replacement functionality for secure remote access Direct Inward Service Access (DISA) that was not available on Lehman's IP communications platform and not easily customized on Lehman's previous telephony platform. Metreos enabled Lehman to move beyond basic authentication and connectivity to enhance its deployment for advanced security and reporting.

--ActiveRelay is a find me-follow me solution with device mobility, enabling users to have a single number and selectively move between devices without interrupting a call.

--A new Broadcast Application was developed internally by Lehman Brothers to alleviate the high maintenance costs associated with an existing broadcast application provider. This application is integrated into Lehman's home page and is Web-enabled, providing an easy transmission of broadcast messages throughout its worldwide offices.

--QuickDial is a custom application written by Lehman for their equity research group to deliver market information to customers. This application is a Web-enabled, predictive dialing and voice recording solution that makes research analysts more productive by freeing up time and allowing for more efficient customer communications.

--Jabber Instant Messaging integration provides additional presence information with Lehman's IM systems to show if an employee is presently busy on the phone and tightly integrating the IP communications and IM infrastructure, resulting in more efficient communications use.

The enterprise market has embraced IP communications for toll bypass and cost reduction, but the far greater benefits of converged communications and business process gains remain unrealized. Enterprises are now demanding applications that leverage their IP communications environment, but are faced with numerous vendor-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), a lack of telephony-skilled developers, and a lack of integrated tools, which significantly increases development and deployment cost, complexity and risks. Until now, the reseller channel and enterprises have been unable to leverage a common platform for communications application development, deployment, and maintenance.

Metreos provides a complete communications application environment (CAE) that empowers enterprises and systems integrators to quickly develop and deploy innovative, customized communications applications that leverage converged voice and data networks. The Metreos CAE significantly reduces the time and complexity of building voice applications while ensuring their reliable deployment and use by any company size. The Metreos CAE includes:

--A suite of packaged, customizable voice and data applications that deliver immediate out-of-the-box value to enterprises using Cisco's IP Communications infrastructure.

--A visual rapid application development tool that enables developers with little or no telephony experience to create, within hours, IP communications applications.

--An extensible voice application server that abstracts the complexities of heterogeneous voice equipment and enterprise data applications, with support for industry standards such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), H.323, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Web services.

--A run-time environment that provides native media processing and processes interactions with the voice infrastructure, ensuring the reliability of enterprise voice systems.