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Twice a week, 52 weeks a year, Vie de France Corp. used to divert one of its well paid sales professionals from generating profits to feeding a fax machine for 20 hours. That's how long it took to send price quotes to the 250 restaurants that buy the McLean, Va., company's line of imported fruits, fish and vegetables.
Today, the sales department's stand-alone fax machine stands idle most of the time. Instead, price quotes and other fax documents are sent directly from a $3,000 local-area network-based fax server that information systems director Warren Fay says paid for itself in six weeks.
At Cummins Cash and Information Services Co., it took a little longer--three months--for a fax server tied to a network of mainframe-connected terminals to pay for itself. Since its installation, Cummins, a Grand Prairie, Texas, transportation services company, has pulled the plug on the 70 stand-alone fax machines it had used to send 8,000 truck permits a day.
"If a truck is sitting still, it isn't making money," says Art Sahlstein, Cummings' director of network operations. "Using the system, the fax permit is delivered in 10 to 15 seconds, often while the driver is still on the phone to us."
Bye-bye stand-alones
Vie de France and Cummins are just two of the growing number of businesses integrating fax, computer and network technology to streamline the costs, time and inconvenience commonly associated with fax transmission. Increasingly, network-based fax servers, which enable users to fax documents directly from personal computers and terminals, are replacing stand-alone units, which some experts say could be obsolete by the end of the decade.
By 1996, the market for LAN-based fax servers, including necessary software, will exceed $1 billion, according to research firm International Resource Development, Inc. Operating in much the same way as LAN-based print servers, today's simplest LAN-based fax servers consist of a PC board and accompanying...