Roswell, GA-based fax technologies provider Commetrex (News - Alert) offers fax and other media-processing technologies for the service provider market. Now, the company’s BladeWare full-featured platform has helped position them as a strong provider of enterprise fax.

Last year, the company announced a partnership with Sangoma to combine Commetrex’ BladeWare HMP telephony platform with Sangoma’s digital and analog telephony interface boards to offer a broader product offering for enterprise fax OEM.

To find out more about the company, and their partnership with Sangoma, I caught up with Tom Ray (News - Alert), executive vice president of marketing and sales at Commetrex.

Our exchange follows.

SV:  Who is Commetrex?

TR:  Commetrex develops and markets IP Telephony media technologies and products, such as T.38 fax relay and our BladeWare IP-telephony platform, for telecom-equipment OEMs.

SV:  Today, your focus seems to be mostly on fax technologies and markets?

TR:  Yes.  Since we first shipped our T.38 fax relay software in 1999 and our first-to-market TerminatingT38, we’ve chalked up over 75 licensees of our T.38 technology, and that continues to generate a nice revenue stream for us.  But today, our focus is on the enterprise fax-server OEM, where we are enjoying a satisfying string of design wins that have the potential of re-ordering things a bit in the market.

SV:  What do you mean by “reordering”?

TR:  Well, the short answer is that many of the fax-server OEMs are now taking advantage of BladeWare, with support for both T.38 and G.711 pass-through fax, at a price point that allows these OEMs to expand their addressable market and include the small and medium-size business - and they can do this all while enjoying a functional advantage on a robust system. 

SV:  And the longer answer?

TR:  Due to our market position, we must compete through innovation that brings easily perceived value and advantage to the OEM, or we won’t even be called to the audition.

Because of the move to an all-software IP telephony infrastructure, the market and the demands being placed on fax-server vendors have made rather dramatic changes over the last few years.  Before FoIP, multi-line fax systems had expensive “fax boards” and each channel cost the OEM two-to-four times what a stand-alone fax machine cost. 

This created an understandable push-back from the smaller organization.  But now, IP-PBX (News - Alert) vendors are leveraging software-based fax by adding inherent support for fax in the UM extensions of their PBX.  And, hosted-solution vendors are adding fax.  All of this is putting pressure on the fax-server OEM to respond with greater pricing and configuration flexibility. 

SV:  What do you mean by configuration flexibility?

TR:  That’s where our innovation enters the picture.  First, there was BladeWare’s support for G.711 pass-through fax, as well as T.38.  We have done exhaustive A-B testing with VoIP service providers and IP carriers and have found that servers that only support T.38 have an outbound fax-call completion rate that is five-percent lower than BladeWare equipped with G.711 pass-through support and Commetrex’ patent-applied-for “Smart FoIP” technology.  Now, most people will tell you that G.711 IP fax just doesn’t work.  Well, that may be correct for their products, but not for ours.  Check out our blogto get details on how we did it.

SV: Can you talk some more about configuration flexibility?

TR:  Certainly.  There is our partnership with Sangoma the two companies announced last year.  We all know that the future of telephony is IP, but the future is not quite here.  There’s still the PSTN out there, and when an overnight fax broadcast goes out, nearly all of those send-to telephone numbers are stand-alone terminals directly connected to the PSTN.  That’s why during this transition period to IP telephony, many enterprise customers want a server that can support both networks -- and PSTN support means either in-system PSTN interfaces or an external gateway.  With BladeWare’s recently added support for the Sangoma analog and digital PSTN interfaces, we can offer our OEMs support for both networks on the same system and even the same application software.

The time is now for this unprecedented corporate partnership.  Although the Sangoma product line was originally developed to support the all-software IP PBX, it is perfectly suited to give the BladeWare OEM the same benefit.  BladeWare already had support for fax modems with its support for G.711 pass-through fax, so adding a service manager to BladeWare to support the Sangoma boards was rather straightforward. 
 

SV:  So, do you believe this will allow you to make a difference in enterprise fax?

TR:   Yes, we believe the combination of Commetrex’s BladeWare technology in concert with the Sangoma product line and the overall price-performance make this a compelling solution for the enterprise fax OEM.