SAN MATEO, California, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- Seeks UK partners to target new vertical and geographic markets

Avistar Communications Corporation has completed agreements with four value-added resellers (VARs), as it launches its new Channel Partner Programme. Veloci, Communications III and Manist are Avistar's first resellers in the United States and together bring vertical market experience in energy, legal, healthcare, pharmaceutical, technology, retail, government and education. Sales into new geographies of Japan and Asia are expected from Media Plus, a Japanese VAR, which specializes in videoconferencing. Avistar is actively seeking resellers in the United Kingdom and other European markets to extend the reach and increase the intensity of its sales effort.

"Avistar's Channel Partner Programme launch partners have been justifiably impressed by our market-beating bandwidth control technology, which enables enterprise-wide desktop videoconferencing," said Darren Innes, Avistar's new general manager for worldwide direct and channel sales. "I believe that the earning potential from partnering with Avistar, such as the opportunity for a rapid revenue stream from our unique Hosted offering, which provides Avistar technology as a service, will be attractive to resellers and take us into additional territories and vertical markets."

"The ability to support desktop videoconferencing deployments including thousands of users is a key differentiator for Avistar," said Ira Weinstein, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research, a market research and analyst firm specializing in the field of unified communications. "Avistar's integration with IBM Sametime and the release of its Hosted, or software as a service solution, allows both large and small enterprises to video-enable their user community."

Avistar's Channel Partner Programme covers customer-premise and Hosted products, and is focused on VARs that deliver communications solutions to the Global Fortune 5000 market. These comprise meeting room VARs seeking to extend video to the desktop, PBX and VoIP VARs keen to maximize the value proposition of moving voice onto corporate IP networks, and an emerging breed of unified communications VARs looking to extend the capabilities of systems from IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server to include managed videoconferencing at the desktop.

"We chose to partner with Avistar because of our mission to provide customers with cutting-edge, yet reliable, technology. Avistar has demonstrated its superiority to all rival enterprise desktop videoconferencing offerings available today," said Steven Chesser, president and CEO of Veloci.

"The ability to deliver richness of interaction without extensive network upgrades, combined with rapid deployment, makes Avistar's approach to unified communications very compelling in our markets," said Shuji Ozaki, president of MediaPlus.

The program is designed to motivate VARs to sign up for the highest sales tier that they believe is achievable in order to receive the maximum benefits and discounts. With attractive discounts or commissions, depending on their VAR level and sales result, VARs can easily build a business case to include Avistar in their product and service portfolio.

More information about the Avistar Channel Partner Programme can be found at www.avistar.com/partners

More information about Avistar's Channel Partners can be found at

www.velocicorp.net www.comiii.com www.manist.com www.mediaplus.co.jp

About Avistar Communications Corporation

Avistar is working to define the future of unified communications and collaboration by inventing and delivering integrated visual communications software that helps companies of all sizes improve business results. From the desktop, from the laptop and from conference rooms, Avistar delivers enterprise-quality and easy-to-use audio/video conferencing, multi-party videoconferencing, and integrated data sharing anywhere in the world. By integrating visual communications with enterprise application software, Avistar incorporates communications into the daily workflow and seamlessly connects communities of users within and across enterprises.

Founded in 1993, Avistar is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in New York and London. With more than 15,000 seats sold across 40 countries, Avistar's global deployments of its unified visual communications desktop software are among the largest in the world. Avistar holds a portfolio of 76 patents for inventions in the primary areas of video and network technology and offers technology and IP licenses to companies in video conferencing, rich-media services, public networking and related industries. Current licensees include Sony Corporation, Polycom, Inc., Tandberg ASA, Radvision Ltd. and Emblaze-VCON.

For more information, visit www.avistar.com.

Web site: http://www.avistar.com http://www.velocicorp.net http://www.manist.com

James Ollerenshaw of Austin Lawrence Group, +44-(0)-20-7582-6683, james@austinlawrence.com, for Avistar