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Recently, TMCnet’s Kelly McGuire sat down at the ITEXPO (News - Alert) East 2010 in Miami to speak with Sagem-Interstar's Communications' Strategic Partner Manager Sabrina Stratford about the hardware side of the IP fax products her company sells.

 

'There are so many small businesses who are analog right now, but they know they're going to have to go to VoIP systems,' Stratford said during the video interview.

 

Stratford said the company sells a hardware product called Open Line, where it provides the parts and pieces somebody would have to buy, so 'in one server we have cost-effective faxing, secure document routing and document management' - all in one server appliance. This, she said, makes it 'a very easy purchase,' as you don’t have to go out and find all component parts elsewhere and worry about interoperability issues.

 

Plus, it's not expensive, Stratford said. A two-channel version can be had for under $10,000.

McGuire asked Stratford how such a product matches up with competitors who don't offer a unified system. Stratford said regardless of what the customer has, whether they have analog phones, digital or if they're trying to go to Fax over IP with a voice system, 'they only need to purchase the Open Line server, and then later 'if they make a transition, we can handle that without having to reconfigure the system. They don't have to worry about what the future holds, we'll be able to handle it.'

 

In fact it's made to handle transitions from SMB to enterprise status as well, Stratford said, noting that it can scale up into other Sagem (News - Alert) products when the company outgrows Open Line.

A lot of the server appliances don't have the document management functionality, too, Stratford said, noting that it's a product probably more geared to small and medium businesses, in that it offers up to eight channels. The company has other products more suitable for larger enterprises, which can 'go as large as we need to.'

 

To hear the interview in full, click here.