Straight talk about enterprise-wide fax

Communications News, May, 1998 by Jerry Rackley

Fax solutions developed solely from a LAN-centric or host-centric perspective are finding it harder to compete.

Many organizations have given fax automation center stage for sending and receiving time-critical business documents. First introduced in the mid-1980s, fax servers now enjoy mainstream acceptance in a growing market.

According to Pete Davidson, International Data Corp. program manager for facsimile, 36,000 fax servers were shipped in the U.S. in 1997, with 1998's forecast calling for 59,000 servers to ship--a growth rate of 63.9%.

Ease of installation and quick return on investment characterize today's fax automation solutions, with payback in as little as three to six months. Customers who have embraced fax automation to solve discrete document distribution or productivity problems are now implementing fax automation across their entire enterprise.

To implement fax automation success fully, customers must address two areas of need. They must satisfy the personal preferences and productivity needs of a broad range of users, and, at the same time, manage the distribution of application -generated documents from a wide variety of hosts and applications.

"The two ends of the fax server spectrum are blurring somewhat," says Mark Gilbert, senior research analyst with the Gartner Group. "As NT matures, the vendors who were historically regarded as LAN-fax vendors are providing NT-based products which will become increasingly scalable.

"For the production-class, high-end vendors to respond to the competition, they must continue to differentiate themselves on other fronts such as tight application integration, robust reliability, strong management capabilities, and high levels of service and support," Gilbert continues. "Production-class application output faxing should be viewed as a business utility. The market demands high availability. Users aren't looking for a lot of bells and whistles; they want basic features that work well."

Fax vendors, recognizing this trend, position their solutions as "enterprise" fax solutions. But can they really meet the full spectrum of fax needs in an enterprise? Although many vendors now offer second- and third-generation fax solutions, the market for fax automation remains polarized between historically LAN-centric offerings and host-centric offerings, with the former having the most visibility in the market. Most existing fax solutions cannot adequately meet both the diverse needs of many individuals in the enterprise and the distribution of application-generated output.

LAN-centric fax solutions primarily address personal productivity. Optimized for end-user interaction, they cater to the needs and preferences of the workers who generate, send, and receive documents via desktop applications.

LAN-fax vendors have put their efforts into satisfying the individual user, as is evident in the high degree of consideration given to the interface design and other usability features. LAN-fax solutions include standard features such as fax client software and integration with popular messaging solutions like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange.

The typical LAN-fax environment generates through the server low- to medium-volume traffic, typically in the range of several hundred to several thousand pages per day. LAN-fax configurations usually come with one or two analog telephone lines and cost less than $4,000 to implement.

The lion's share of the installed base of fax servers are LAN-fax servers. However, they reveal their limitations when attempts are made to integrate them with host environments to distribute application-generated documents. Many LAN-fax solutions cannot support host data streams or communications protocols, nor can they reliably scale to handle the volumes associated with this type of faxing.

Production-oriented fax solutions address the distribution needs of back-office application-generated documents, saving time and money compared to other methods of distribution. Designed for application integration, these solutions provide the availability, scalability, and connectivity required in host environments.

This class of server typically supports simultaneous connection to a variety of hosts, including S/390 (SNA), AS/400, and TCP/IP. They often come configured with 16 to 24 telephone lines and commonly a connection to a digital T1 line. These solutions must successfully process large volumes of documents within a specified window of time. This environment makes reliability paramount.

Although production-oriented fax servers represent a relatively small percentage of the total installed base, they process a relatively large percentage of the automated fax distribution volume. Customers routinely process between 15,000 and 20,000 pages per day through an installed server. However, they have limitations when an organization attempts to extend the benefits of their installed fax server to their LAN users. Interfaces have historically lacked the richness of features and sophistication users experience with LAN-fax solutions.