Open Text Corporation, a provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software, has announced a range of fax gateways designed to provide a source for all fax over IP – or FoIP – needs of organizations of all sizes.

With easy implementation, Open Text Fax Gateway (News - Alert) solutions can help customers to lower the total cost of ownership through the consolidation of voice and data network equipment for fax.

“We’re seeing more and more interest in fax over IP in organizations of all sizes because it gives them a promising way to lower costs and consolidate resources,” said Matthew Brine, vice president of fax and document distribution at Open Text.

“The combination of our fax gateways and market-leading fax server software makes it easier than ever to deploy a highly sophisticated FOIP solution that can deliver considerable savings and improve business processes.”

In larger and more complex networks, FoIP implementations can have a number of variables, including how to figure out how to properly configure, test and optimize a general-purpose media gateway to act as a fax gateway.

Purpose-built fax gateways are optimized to work with the Open Text Fax Server, therefore eliminating complexity while also giving customers and partners a single source for service and support.

A number of organizations have an environment intermixed with circuit-switched (telephony) and packet-switched (IP) technologies. These two divergent technologies can be bridged by Open Text Fax Gateway as the solution simplifies FoIP implementations by converting telephony communications to standards-based SIP and T.38.

In bridging this gap, Open Text Fax Gateway enables customers to leverage data networks for fax transmissions, which can greatly reduce the costs of managing fax-based communications.

As it is based on a highly scalable and reliable architecture, company officials said that Open Text Fax Gateway facilitates network consolidation, boosts fault tolerance and encourages virtualization of Open Text Fax Server to help further reduce the TCO. At the same time, extensive compatibility testing ensures a wide range of support for and interoperability with dozens of telephony and IP devices.

This lower TCO is also driven by a simple user interface, robust diagnostics and reporting to enable centralized monitoring and management of all FoIP ports. Setup time is saved as each gateway is preconfigured for integration with Open Text Fax Server.

In larger deployments, automatic failover will sense when a gateway is unavailable and divert faxes to one or more alternative gateways. This feature helps to increase availability, enhance disaster recovery and lower support costs.

In other Open Text news, Ontario’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade said that it is providing a grant to Open Text to help develop new digital media products and create almost 400 new jobs.

The company expanded its offerings with the purchase of Captaris (News - Alert) as the company’s technology was expected to strengthen Open Text’s ECM solutions by providing another on-ramp for integrating content into its ECM solutions.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Harrison