White Paper Fax Purchasing Decision: Fax Server or Fax

Fax Purchasing Decision:Fax Server or Fax Service?

A White PaperPrepared by Davidson Consulting

Davidson Consulting806 S. Lakeview AvenueSturgis, MI 49091269-651-3157www.davidsonconsulting.biz

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Introduction

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Fax Servers

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Exhibit 1: Considerations or Acquiring a Fax Server

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Internet Fax Servers

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Fax Boards

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Fax Server Hidden Costs

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Internet Fax Services

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Exhibit 2: Considerations or Acquiring a Fax Service

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Fax Server or Fax Service?

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Exhibit 3: Fax Servers versus Fax Services — Pros and Cons

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About the Author

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Table of Contents

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I you are a buyer who is interested in a ax system or your small or medium-sized business or large enterprise, you have a choice tomake as to whether you want to use a ax server or a ax service. First you need to understand why you are making a ax purchase.Whether it is or axing that your employees do every day or i you are contemplating automating an enterprise application, thedecision to go with a ax server or ax service can make a dierence in how much control you eel you have over your axingoperations and can also impact the costs you incur. In 2006, the market or ax servers grew just 0.4% to $280 million while themarket or Internet ax services grew 26.4% to $570 million, according to two market research reports done by Davidson Consulting.Businesses also may be considering whether to upgrade their existing ax servers. They may have many individual ax serversscattered among their departments and now are considering installing two large ax servers that will serve the entire enterprise. Wesay two ax servers because corporations are wise to oer some redundancy i they have large installations. It is ar less expensive toconsolidate ax servers than to have many servers or each department in an organization. For one, the number o ax boards requiredat each server in so many departments is much greater than the number used when servers are consolidated. Second, the amount ohidden costs will be much greater when one considers the maintenance o dozens o ax servers compared to just a couple. Then youcan have a centralized maintenance sta. Another tactic that IT departments may consider is to have a single large server and a axservice to complement it. More on this below.Perhaps you have a production ax application where you want to automate the unattended sending o hundreds o purchase ordersovernight, potentially saving a bundle in labor and mailing costs while getting the purchase orders out to buyers more quickly.Production ax accounted or 33.7% o all ax server installations in 2006 and accounted or $86 million in ax services. You canhandle this type o application rom either a ax server or a ax service, although some IT personnel will eel more comortablewith an in-house solution because o a belie that it is insecure to ever have that type o data on an outside server. Nonetheless,many enterprises decide to go with a ax service to handle all their axing needs, including production axing. One reason that manyenterprises decide to go with a service is because they don’t have the personnel to manage an in-house servers and they want tolower the TCO o their ax solutions.Either way, using an automated ax system has the primary benet o enabling you to better manage your ax activity. For example,it enables your users to send les directly rom their desktops, without having to walk to a ax machine, saving big dollars in laborcosts. Moreover, it means that every le your workers ax can be automatically archived, a key requirement o many complianceregulations like the Health Inormation Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Finally, every axis automatically received in email, which means that axes are not sitting as paper in ax machine out-trays and they, too, can beautomatically archived.

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Introduction

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