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