Fax management system saves costs

To increase volume and streamline its fax broadcast process, Informa has recently integrated Captaris RightFax with their Cisco VOIP infrastructure.

Informa plc has recently integrated Captaris RightFax with their Cisco VOIP infrastructure to merge, increase volume and streamline their fax broadcast process.

The initiative is the result of the acquisition of knowledge and skills transfer company IIR by Informa plc in 2006.

Both organisations broadcast huge volumes of promotional outbound faxes to their respective databases.

At the time of acquisition, IIR was using Captaris RightFax to meet volumes of 30,000 pages a day and Informa used ZetaFax.

IIR had successfully run RightFax for five years, expanding the system in 2005 to 30 Ports.

Informa were experiencing limitations on output with their system, so it seemed sensible and good business practice to integrate the fax processes of both organisations and centrally manage this now even larger volume of outgoing faxes using RightFax.

The 30 Port RightFax System, which was purchased from Avanquest, was connected to Informa's existing Cisco VOIP infrastructure for delivery of fax calls to the PSTN.

The next stage was to move to a Shared Services operation for fax broadcasting and benefit from the convergence and streamlining of functions and link the IIR and Informa servers together.

This would enable the company to make the most of the 60 RightFax channel licenses they had available.

The linked servers use the new Version 9.3 Shared Services Module of RightFax which facilitates the sharing of the SQL database, resulting in the load being automatically balanced within the network and greater resiliency and reduced workload for the Systems Administrator.

Both Servers utilised IP connectivity and because IIR had purchased an IP ready card from Avanquest, they were able to seamlessly convert to a FoIP integration from their previous ISDN30 connection at no extra cost.

Johan Rossouw, Network Systems manager at Informa commented: "One of the biggest advantages to us moving on to RightFax 9.3 is the role that the session initiation protocol (SIP) plays in the transport of faxes from the RightFax servers to the PSTN.

Due to the design of our WAN and centralised voice gateway infrastructure, we managed to utilise the SIP functionality in RightFax 9.3 to send faxes to a voice gateway located in a completely different geographic location.

This of course eliminated the need for additional and expensive direct ISDN30 (PRI) connectivity for each fax server".

Opting for a RightFax Shared Services solution is more than just centralisation, it has enabled Informa to appreciate the economies of scale and increase efficiency.

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