American Chartered banks on XMediusFAX^® for its Avaya VoIP environment

The Client

Based in metropolitan Chicago, American Chartered Bank is the premier bank in the northwest Illinois suburban corridor, with 14 locations. It is a full-service commercial and retail bank, serving privately owned small- and medium-sized businesses and individual customers. Its mission is to provide customers with the best value in banking products and services, and to provide superlative customer service at all times.

The Challenge

Fax is critical to American Chartered Bank (ACB). While almost all of its 450 employees transmit important financial documents every day, a full 40 percent are considered heavy fax users, sending and receiving thousands of pages of sensitive account and loan information and other banking documents every month. And a great many of these are created on employee desktops and then printed just to be faxed.

ACB was using 40 standalone fax machines connected to POTS lines to support this fax-intensive environment. This represented not only a large capital equipment investment, but also a steady outlay of service and supply expenses.

Recently, ACB entrusted the upgrading of its legacy PBX system to CCC Technologies, a Gold-level Avaya Business Partner. CCC implemented a VoIP system that featured an Avaya Communication Manager at its heart. Soon after implementing its VoIP system, ACB decided to investigate moving its fax traffic from standalone fax machines to a fax server solution that would:

• Deliver faxes right to employee desktops and e-mail inboxes
• Allow employees to send faxes directly from Microsoft Office applications without having to print them first
  
• Reduce paper use (i.e., only print the most important documents and pages)
• Increase security by not having confidential faxes sitting in open areas
• Integrate seamlessly with its Avaya Communication Manager for a full Fax over IP (FoIP) solution
• Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) of its fax infrastructure (i.e., eliminate fax machines and the supplies and maintenance costs that go with them)

The Solution

After researching several products, ACB found that XMediusFAX was the only fax server solution that would both integrate with its Avaya VoIP system and offer the robust set of end-user features it desired. ACB had considered a Multi-Tech product, but it offered neither a robust solution set nor FoIP integration, requiring analog connections and/or separate circuits.

ACB also looked at Captaris’s RightFax, but it required an expensive third-party component to integrate with its Avaya network, which would still not allow ACB to fully leverage its VoIP infrastructure like XMediusFAX did. Plus, RightFax had not been certified as Avaya Compliant-Tested.

CCC Technologies also pointed out that XMediusFAX is a mature boardless FoIP solution – with a five-year-plus track record of success – that was built from the ground up to do IP faxing, whereas the Captaris RightFax product favored the legacy approach of expensive fax board implementations.

As promised by CCC Technologies and Sagem-Interstar, XMediusFAX installed seamlessly with ACB’s Avaya Communication Manager. ACB’s Gary Peters, Second Vice President of Information Systems, said, “XMediusFAX did claim to offer ‘seamless integration,’ and now that we have it up and running, this is absolutely true. There is only one screen that we need to maintain, as we add DID numbers to our fax services.”

Results and Benefits

ACB is now enjoying the benefits of XMediusFAX at every level of the organization. The administrators proclaimed that it “does everything that was promised and is very easy to administer.” ACB is also impressed with Sagem-Interstar’s system setup training and post-installation support. According to Peters, “The level of support from Sagem-Interstar has been as good as we hoped, if not better. They have a very knowledgeable staff and are very friendly to work with.”

ACB end-users are particularly enthused about the feature-rich SendFAX client, which allows them to assemble fax documents directly from their Microsoft Office applications, adding appropriate cover pages, and faxing directly from their desktops. This saves them a lot of time too – no more walking back and forth to the fax machine. As well, Peters said, “Everyone likes the way they can now receive faxes into their email boxes and only print those items that they absolutely need to print.”

For ACB, Sagem-Interstar’s partnership with CCC Technologies is a perfect fit: the boardless XMediusFAX T.38 fax server solution leverages ACB’s Avaya VoIP environment while providing multiple user benefits and many cost savings.