XMediusFAX^TM AXP edition delivers a fail-over solution at the branch office

The Client

Van Meter Industrial Inc. is one of America’s top 30 largest electrical and automation wholesale distributors. They are located in Iowa and have multiple branch locations throughout the state. The company serves the industrial, construction, and OEM markets. In 2001, VMI entered into a 50/50 joint venture with Werner Electric Supply of Wisconsin to purchase what is now known as Werner Electric of Minnesota. The three financially distinct companies work together to provide customers with the best services and products available, and their suppliers the opportunity to partner with them in the pursuit of continuous and strong market growth.

Over 30% of the company’s 600 employees use fax services. On a daily basis, the company transmits and receives between 100 and 400 faxes and conduct business between 21 branch office/remote locations.

The type of documents being sent and received by VMI employees include customer inquiries, customer POs, order confirmations from suppliers, return authorization requests and approvals, as well as, technical documentation. Each of these transactions is considered to be very important in their day-to-day activities.

VMI’s fax infrastructure consisted of small branch office analog fax machines spread throughout the organization. As such, VMI was experiencing the standard “fax-problems” associated to inefficient legacy technologies.

Three years ago, after researching other fax server solutions on the market, VMI replaced their existing infrastructure and deployed the XMediusFAX SP edition as a centralized fax server solution at their headquarters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Analog fax lines at all remote branches were terminated into Cisco routers or where applicable, moved onto digital lines as DIDs at the remote location. As a result, faxes would be transmitted via T.38 to the central fax server, which sent the fax via their exchange server to either a shared or personal mailbox.

By migrating to an all software solution the company reduced the number of printed faxes and machines, and, was able to maintain electronic copies of the faxed documents. As well, XMediusFAX fulfilled the criteria needed by VMI to have their fax server solution integrate their existing Cisco VoIP platform and leverage their investment.

The Challenge

Recently, VMI was experiencing WAN link problems at a remote site in Minnesota, causing the loss of fax service. The fax traffic at this remote office is considered to be intensive and urgent, hence a quick and effective solution was required to terminate the fax locally and then use e-mail to deliver it.

While VMI continued to investigate the re-engineering and upgrade of their WAN link, a branch office solution that would leverage their existing XMediusFAX and Cisco infrastructure to circumvent any RTP/WAN issues was being sought.

Sagem-Interstar’s XMediusFAX AXP edition T.38 FoIP based solution hosted on Cisco’s AXP within Cisco’s Integrated Services Router (ISR) 2800 series proved to be a logical choice to perfectly interoperate with their centrally located XMediusFAX SP edition fax server.

The Solution

In selecting the XMediusFAX AXP edition for implementation at their remote office in Minnesota, VMI took advantage of the Cisco Application eXtension Platform’s capability of being able to host software applications from independent software vendors directly on their Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR) hardware platform.

VMI established a local faxing capability without the need to install a fax server based solution. By deploying the XMediusFAX AXP edition, VMI leveraged their existing ISR hardware to benefit from the only Cisco ISR/ AXP optimized global fax solution on the market.

VMI now has the XMediusFAX SP edition running centrally along with an AXP edition at the remote location. Any future interruptions on their existing WAN link will no longer disrupt fax service to and from the branch office, as all faxes can be managed locally at the branch.

As well, in going forward, VMI can benefit from new feature offerings within the XMediusFAX AXP edition, i.e., the ability to play into various deployment models ranging from disaster recovery to remote branch survivability (inter-system replication) when peered with an XMediusFAX SP edition.

The Expected Results

Deploying the state-of-the-art Cisco AXPXMediusFAX FoIP solution at a remote branch location has provided VMI a reliable and robust solution to their WAN link problems. The organization now enjoys and will continue to leverage their newly distributed infrastructure. The AXP solution thus becomes an anchor in any future branch office deployments.

The XMediusFAX AXP edition supports key core technologies including virtualization and T.38 based FoIP. It permits organizations like VMI, unprecedented flexibility to rapidly and easily deploy cost effective and green optimized solutions. The deployment of the AXP edition on the existing Cisco ISR hardware enables hardware footprint reductions at the remote branch office in Minnesota by eliminating the need for single purpose server hardware, and thereby reduces energy consumption and provides environmental benefits in the process.

VMI easily deployed Cisco’s Application Runtime Network Module (NME) into their ISR router and configured the AXP hosting environment with minimal training. VMI is reaping the benefits delivered by the XMediusFAX AXP edition’s cost and application optimized solution for branch office environments.