Duke University serves vast VoIP-enabled campus with XMediusFAX^® SP

The Client

Duke University, a major American university based in Durham, North Carolina, comprises over 200 buildings, and more than 13,000 students and 29,000 employees. It includes the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI), which is the world’s largest academic clinical research organization, as well as the Fuqua School of Business, a globally renowned business school.

The Challenge

For Duke’s DCRI, clinical research and report documents are critical to its over 900 staff members and 5,000 investigators. Moving them quickly, securely and confidentially through Duke’s vast telecommunications infrastructure is vital. The previous fax vendor, Captaris, had failed to meet DCRI’s business requirements with the RightFax fax server. Captaris required a large outlay for upgrading and renewing service that DCRI did not want to absorb. Eventually, Captaris ceased customer support, and the RightFax legacy system went out of service at DCRI.

Added to DCRI’s fax vendor problems, Duke “experienced an uncontrolled growth of PBX systems years ago on campus that left us to manage a hodge-podge of systems with no way to leverage them against a bigger, centralized solution,” according to Robert Johnson, Director of Communications Infrastructure at Duke’s Office of Information Technology (OIT).

Consequently, Duke’s OIT identified a need for a single campus-wide fax solution that would:

• Integrate seamlessly with a VoIP environment
• Eliminate the dependency on expensive fax modems
• Have built-in call accounting for accurate bill-back of all fax usage
• Ensure fax confidentiality for each hospital, school, faculty, etc.
• Be compatible with various existing data-management tools such as DCRI’s Siebel report system

The Solution

In addition to upgrading and renewal issues, Captaris (RightFax) was also not able to meet DCRI’s requirement for a T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP) server system that integrates seamlessly with Avaya Communication Manager.

DCRI decided to select Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX, since it was the only boardless T.38 FoIP solution Compliant-Tested and certified for the Avaya Communication Manager. Meanwhile, the Fuqua School of Business was also very impressed with XMediusFAX’s many features and benefits, and they too submitted a purchase order.

Consequently, Duke’s OIT saw an opportunity for a university-wide rollout. “We selected XMediusFAX because it is compatible with our multi-vendor environment, which employs an Avaya VoIP interface. As well, it is scalable and simple to deploy,” said Robert Johnson. “After two separate departments targeted XMediusFAX, we decided to make it available throughout the university and our hospital system. Since XMediusFAX SP is a software-only solution, we’ll only need to license more fax channels as usage increases, not buy and implement additional hardware.”

Results and Benefits

Instead of legacy vendor problems and substandard service, Duke now has:

• A centralized, multi-tenant FoIP server to securely support all of its hospitals, schools, faculty, and students (with the required bill-back reporting mechanism)
• For DCRI – integration with its Siebel system to process and fax out research reports

“XMediusFAX SP allows us to serve the entire campus and hospital system with a single fax server solution. Implementation, training, and ongoing service will remain simple and cost effective,” declares Johnson.

Duke is guaranteed an immediate return on investment (ROI), due to:

• Elimination of expensive fax boards
• Reduction in the number of fax lines
• Cost savings on paper, toner, and other materials required in a conventional fax environment
• Benefits of faxes sharing a common inbox with email and voicemail (Unified Communications)

With desktop-based IP faxing, Duke is also experiencing increased productivity. Studies have shown that employees can save up to 40 minutes per day, since faxes arrive directly in their inboxes or on secure printers, rather than in a common area.

As well, Duke’s future faxing capacity is ensured, even though they expect the system will grow to 150–200 channels. Thanks to its highly scalable architecture, XMediusFAX SP can handle up to 480 channels per IP fax server. Plus, Duke can look forward to Sagem-Interstar’s feature-rich upgrades and unparalleled customer support.