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Recently, TMC had a chance to sit down and talk with Sabrina Stratford, Strategic Partner Manager at IP fax vendor Sagem-Interstar (News - Alert). Stratford addressed the topics of which segment of the enterprise Open Line fits into, and the value of Open Line vis-à-vis other similar appliances available on the market.

 

The difference, Stratford said during an interview that’s available here as a podcast, is that Open Line is “an all-in-one appliance” for IP fax, so they’ve included secure document routing, as well as echo-friendly document management “all in one fax server appliance. Everything stays within the security of your computer system.”

 

It’s basically “a fax archive,” Stratford said, saving people from worrying about the problem of “What do we do with all these fax scans?” Since it’s digitized, “everything can take place within Open Line,” she said, “and now you’re faxing from your desk top. And you can do that from a Web-based Open Line interface, or you can do it from your e-mail client. And if you’re working from Word, if you can print it you can fax it,” one of the most convenient qualities of IP fax.

 

As far as where it fits in the market, as Stratford said, “We’re seeing a couple trends. It seems to be going in at the department level, and branch offices.” At the departmental level, she said, “we’re finding that a lot of the time, people have a budget, maybe under $10,000, to get something, and we can certainly accommodate that.”

 

And if an enterprise is getting a huge document management rollout that a certain department can’t wait for or isn’t going to be included in, they can “move forward” with the Open Line product for IP Fax, adding that even if there’s another enterprise-wide product in use, she noted, Open Line is something that can be used as a low-cost tool at a specific branch.

 

And comparing Open Line to other IP Fax products on the market, Stratford noted that “we offer so much more than just faxing.” In one appliance, she said you get the hardware server itself, an OCR engine, an archive database, library services, a database, version control workflow and a lot more.

 

Listen to the full interview here.