April 2003

This month marks the debut of the CEO Spotlight section in Internet Telephony® magazine. We undertake this section in recognition of the outstanding work performed by exemplary companies and we promise to bring you the opinions of the heads of companies leading the Internet telephony industry now and helping to shape the future of the industry. This month, we interviewed Guy Blanchette who has served as president and chief executive officer of Interstar Technologies, Inc., since October 2000.

IT: What is Interstar’s Mission?
GB: Our mission today is clearer than ever: To help organizations transition their document workflow from paper to electronic networks, to utilize existing IP infrastructure to reduce hard costs and increase manageability and productivity. We are delivering ‘twenty-first century fax’ today, and even more tomorrow.

IT: What is your vision for Interstar?
GB: Interstar is a strong R&D company dedicated to improving business communication. We’re using our expertise in IP telephony to create applications that layer and improve the way companies do business incrementally. We’re expanding our reach with global partnerships to market our products. And we work diligently with our customers to ensure that our technology really benefits, not burdens, their business.


IT: Describe some of the key decisions that you have made as CEO to steer your company through the recent challenging financial straits.
GB: When I arrived, Interstar was still in startup mode, and the dot-com meltdown was beginning. I curbed short-term spending and decided to spend some of our accumulated profits on expanding the sales, marketing, and R&D departments. In a short period of time, we increased our sales and released new, improved versions of our software. The market has rewarded us: We have enjoyed incremental growth over the past 24 months. We invested in our people and our products during the market downturn, and this decision proved to be the winning formula for us.

IT: What makes Interstar’s services unique?
GB: Interstar is unique in its industry as an R&D-based organization. We’ve revolutionized the way faxes are actually transmitted -- we’ve eliminated the dependence on proprietary hardware. For organizations making the move to voice over IP -- and there are many more poised to do so in 2003 -- we’re going to double their return on investment. I’m also proud to say that we offer, in my opinion, the best pre-and-post-sales technical support in the business -- we tailor our solutions to fit our clients’ needs, we don’t just ship them a box. We’re an agile company. Integration and customization are just two of many valuable services we offer to our customers.

IT: What is the most pressing issue facing our industry?
GB: In our market, driving ROI for our customers is paramount -- in today’s economic climate, getting more out of the systems you already have is the key to success. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with products like XMediusFAX, which allow customers to layer fax on top of their existing IP voice/data networks, and integrate with enterprise applications, without a huge outlay for new hardware.

Enterprise e-document integration is something that is now within the reach of medium-sized organizations. These are the customers for whom ROI means the difference between profitability and going out of business. Today, thanks to affordable high-speed networking, storage systems, and software like ours that integrates with enterprise apps, e-document workflows are now within these customers’ reach. It’s not just for Fortune 500 companies... when you examine the true, ongoing cost of maintaining old paper-based processes -- in space, energy, paper, consumables, and people’s time and labor -- versus the flexibility you gain in the digital space -- the decision to go electronic is simple.

IT: What do you see as being the future of the enterprise fax industry?
GB: Open standards and integration. We’ve got to focus on standardized platforms to allow businesses to layer and link telephony with their enterprise applications and processes. We’re a strong believer in open standards -- it levels the playing field for new, innovative companies to contribute value to the IP telephony economy, and we look forward to doing just that.

[ Return To The April 2003 Table Of Contents ]