by Jeff Owen
Biscom, founded in 1986 and headquartered in Chelmsford, MA, is a supplier of FoIP/Fax products and services supporting over 5,000 clients. According to a Davidson Consulting report released earlier this year, “Biscom is the third-leading FoIP vendor with $15.1 million in 2011 revenues which raised its share of the market from 6.2% in 2010 to 7.0% in 2011.”
I spoke with Alan Gonsenhauser, SVP, Chief Marketing Officer, and John Lane, VP of Customer and Technical Support, to learn more about the company and their solutions.
Gonsenhauser said several Wang engineers started the company 26 years ago and they are in two major businesses. The first is enterprise fax (85% of their business with 66% of that in FoIP) including servers, hosted cloud-on-demand, and a hybrid platform. Their second business is secure file transfer. Putting these together, their solution portfolio provides for secure document delivery. Historically, customers have come from the healthcare, financial services, government, education, manufacturing, transportation and legal sectors.
When I asked what differentiates Biscom, Gonsenhauser went on to say their biggest advantages are innovation (with 6 patents and one pending) and customer service. They primarily operate in a direct sales, service, technical support and applications engineering model, but also work with system integrators, resellers and select OEM partners.
Lane segued from Gonsenhauser’s discussion on market differentiation by adding, “The biggest differentiator for us is that we work with our customers in a cooperative and consultative manner, We coordinate with our sales engineers to ensure the offered solution is a good fit for the customer’s environment. After implementation, should an issue occur we work with customers to help them troubleshoot, find a solution; provide programming specifications and configuration documentation for the different types of switches (e.g. Cisco, Avaya) to resolve problems.”
One of their recent innovations is a full-color, high-resolution, high-definition fax which works completely over IP and provides an encrypted point-to-point solution for sensitive documents and images. Their hybrid platform includes both on-premises fax servers and a hosted cloud service with identical interfaces that work together. Fax users and administrators use the same Faxcom Suite for Windows MMC to manage the on-premises server and access the hosted one. End users run the same desktop and wqeb clients to send/receive faxes. This solution can be especially effective in a disaster recovery or business continuity situation as well as supporting a flexible, scalable Fax/FoIP environment.
Biscom has built strong business relationships with Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and others over the years to meet compliance requirements and ensure their solutions will work in these environments, and their solutions work with all the certifications tested with the Dialogic SR-140.
There are several downloadable whitepapers designed to educate and aid in the decision process of acquiring and implementing a Fax/FoIP solution. Among these are “Top 10 Considerations when Evaluating Enterprise FoIP” and “Dialogic Whitepaper: Considerations for Using T.38 versus G.711 for FoIP.”
More at www.biscom.com
