Pandora Networks Announces Live!TM Collaboration Services that Improve Person-to-Person Contact while Slashing Telecom Costs

Uses Web, Instant Messaging Networks, and Teleconferencing with Call Center Capabilities for Business Applications starting at $25 per month

ALAMEDA, CA - October 30, 2001 (INB) -- Pandora Networks, a provider of collaborative communications services has announced the availability of Live!, an enhanced business communications service that offers unprecedented cost savings and greater productivity. The application improves how businesses interact with their customers, partners, and employees, by allowing real-time communications and collaboration services from multiple channels including the web, email, and instant messaging networks including AOL's AIM and Microsoft's MSN service. It also allows teleconferencing services starting at just 8 cents per minute anywhere in the US. The combined savings from IM, web-based communications and reduced teleconferencing costs can reduce the total cost of business communications by more than 50%.

According to Walter Snell, CEO of Pandora Networks, "Live! also bypasses messaging systems such as voice-mail and email that too often cause delayed responses, missed contacts, and lost business. People demand instant communications and the companies that provide this will gain their loyalty. Our WebACDTM technology immediate routes a caller to the desktop of a relevant employee from web pages, online documents, email signature lines, or even from another application. From there, employees can talk back using the telephone or use instant messaging, while engaging our powerful collaboration services." According to Pandora Networks, Live! reduces the time to "live-contact" from an average of 24 hours to "real-time" and provides collaboration tools that enable productive conversations - not just voice or text. A Live! enhanced employee can manage multiple conversation sessions to further increase productivity.

Live! is a Windows-based collaboration application that interfaces to Pandora's ConversyxTM collaboration platform that remotely provides all of the tools and services to enable routing, outbound telephony, AOL, Yahoo, and MSN instant messaging network access, and collaboration services such as web page, forms, and file sharing. It also allows employees to push information instantly over the Internet such as datasheets, documents, forms, and files instead of using email and or mail. All contact sessions including those from AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft Network instant messaging are recorded and can be monitored in real time. The Live! application works in any network environment, even highly secure enterprise networks such as financial and defense institutions where firewalls and proxies make most collaboration applications ineffective.

Pandora Networks offers Live! as a hosted application starting at $25.00 per seat/per month. It's priced at nearly ten times less than yesterday's less powerful solutions. Businesses may also opt to operate the service on their own premises if they wish to share the session and profiling data with other applications such as CRM and Sales Force Automation. "Live! is the first collaboration technology that has successfully broken the scalability and networking barriers that held back older collaboration services. This has enabled us to provide an affordable product to any sized company whether it's a Fortune 50 or a small business. Live! is a must have application for any organization." says Brad Beyer, VP of Product Development.

Live! is well suited for sales offices, help desks, call centers, e-commerce services, B2B exchanges, telecommuters, internal communications, and anywhere business relationships can be improved with real-time communications. Live! is the first member of a family of collaborative communication services being developed by Pandora Networks and has been undergoing rigorous beta testing and trials at such companies as GE, inFocus, Robertson Stephens, Hasbro, First Peer, Kawin Interactive, and Aircraft Marketplace. John Young, VP of Business Development at Aircraft Marketplace, a B2B business exchange for the aircraft industry states that, "Live! allows our exchange to add the important human element between different organizations without once leaving our web site thus maintaining the fast pace of collaboration, which are what B2B exchanges are about".

Live! is available for a free 30-day trial by signing up at our web site. For more information, contact Pandora Networks or visit our web site at http://www.pandoranetworks.com

Source : Pandora Networks