Dubai, February 05, 2009. Aastra announces at the Middle East Call Centre Conference and Exhibition 09 an Arabic version of its award-winning multimedia contact centre Solidus eCare™, which will be available during the first half of 2009.

Aastra's latest release of its IP based contact centre enables customers to achieve increased levels of scalability, reliability, productivity and cost-savings. Solidus eCare™ 6.0 comes with new options for high-availability server clustering and large-scale networking for up to 10,000 agents and can cope witha busy hour traffic load of up to 400,000 calls per hour.

Multimodal self services like interactive voice response, automated virtual agent chat, automated e-mail response, text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition, allow substantial savings in call centrehuman resource costs - a crucial requirement in today's tough economic situation. A powerful

integration with workflow management tools from major vendors such as TeleOpti - will help call centre managers optimize their most important asset and cost factor, the human resources. Solidus eCare™ 6.0 can now be tightly integrated with back office business applications - such as SAP® - to offer the right customer information to the agents.

"Clients can now be served with greater speed, accuracy and efficiency via any contact means they wish (telephone, internet, email, fax, SMS) with consistent quality, thereby delivering maximum customer satisfaction" says Peter Hofman, President and Managing Director of Aastra Telecom Middle East. He adds "With the introduction of Arabic language support we are showing our serious commitment to serving the local markets in the region. We opened our regional headquarters for Middle East and North Africa in Dubai last year after acquiring Ericsson's enterprise division and are further developing and enhancing the acquired products. At the same time we plan to introduce other Aastraproducts in the region"

Mr. Hofman concludes: "Aastra was awarded the 2008 Frost & Sullivan Growth Strategy Leadership Award in the European enterprise communications market by Frost & Sullivan. Being one of the companies dedicated to enterprise communication with strong financial fundamentals, we plan to continue this trend in 2009 and are looking for dedicated channel partners for Contact Centres and

Applications in the Middle East and North Africa to grow with us.

Aastra's Solidus eCare™ has won several awards and can boast a 10 year history of server-based contact centres. Solidus eCare™ is at the heart of one of the largest call centres in the Middle East, namely Telecom Egypt with some 1,000 agent seats in Cairo and Alexandria offering innovative directory assistance services using SMS. Aastra's Solidus eCare™ was also delivered to major governmental organisations in the UAE.

Note: SAP is the trademark or registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries

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About Aastra Telecom Middle East
Aastra Telecom Middle East is the Middle East and North Africa business unit of Aastra Technologies Limited, (TSX:"AAH"), a leading company at the forefront of the enterprise communication market. Headquartered in Concord, Ontario, Canada, Aastra develops and delivers innovative communications products and applications for businesses. Aastra's operations are truly global with more than 50 million installed lines around the world and a direct and indirect presence in more than 100 countries. Aastra is entirely dedicated to enterprise communications and offers one of the most complete portfolios of unified communications solutions individually tailored to satisfy its customers' requirements. These range from feature-rich call managers for small and medium businesses and highly scalable ones for large enterprises, integrated mobility, call centre solutions to a wide selection of terminals. With a strong focus on open standards, Aastra enables enterprises to communicate and collaborate more efficiently.

For additional information on Aastra Telecom Middle East and North Africa, visit our website at http://www.aastra-mena.com

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© Press Release 2009