Cloud Fax Services Consolidated IT Infrastructure at Austrian Post

Growing Communication Services for the Whole Country

Austrian Post (Österreichische Post) makes a significant contribution to sustaining and securing the communication and logistics infrastructure of the country by providing the Austrian population and businesses with dependable postal services across the entire nation. For the postal service’s staff, fax communication is an integral part of their daily business. Both the number of users and the volume of fax pages sent are continuously on the rise.

Consolidation of the IT Infrastructure

Cloud fax services and managed fax services offer a great many benefits compared with conventional fax server infrastructures: higher levels of fail-safety, no capacity bottlenecks and considerable flexibility. IT analysts recommend replacing fax servers with cloud fax services when consolidating the IT infrastructure. Hence, the task was to implement an electronic fax transmission system, which would result in a leaner company IT architecture and minimize the efforts and costs expended on the fax infrastructure.

Speedy Decision in Favour of Retarus Cloud Fax Services

In spring 2012 Austrian Post tasked its IT service provider, Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH, with finding an alternative to the fax servers that had previously been in use. Following a brief evaluation, it was found that the cloud-based managed fax services offered by Retarus fulfilled Austria Post’s demanding functionality and usability requirements perfectly.

Hitting the Limits

The enormous amounts of messages and business records which have to be sent to customers and partners around the world every month were stretching the staff and systems engaged in this work to their limits. Moreover, users had little convenience in sending faxes and the fax servers were lacking sufficient fail-safety.
Retarus’ cloud fax services and Fax-to-email service were able to alleviate the saturation problems Austrian Post was experiencing.

Convenient, Fast Transmission via Retarus’ Fax Infrastructure

The conversion of the messages – including attached MS Office and PDF documents – as well as the actual delivery via fax to the recipients is carried out by way of Retarus’ multiply redundant data centers, meaning that it is no longer necessary for companies to have their own fax infrastructures. Users are provided with a variety of cover sheets for the transmission of fax messages. At the same time, they can decide which sender and recipient details to display and transmit (name, address, as well as phone or fax number). The confirmation of receipt is provided to the sender automatically as soon as transmission has been completed. Thanks to Retarus Faxolution for Exchange the entire country-wide and international fax communication has become appreciably easier.

Convenient Digital Fax Reception via Email

Incoming fax messages are forwarded to defined email inboxes using Retarus Fax-to-email. For the reception of faxes, Retarus provides Austrian Post around 2,000 fax numbers. This means that each fax user has their own fax extension allowing them to receive incoming fax messages directly via email as TIFF or PDF files. Fax number extensions already in use were ported into the new electronic fax transmission and reception system. All fax documents which are received digitally can be easily incorporated into existing workflow systems as required.

User-Friendly IT Environment Increases Efficiency

Austrian Post now has access to a highly professional cloud fax service incorporated directly into the Microsoft Exchange environment. All employees are in the position to send and receive messages – irrespective of the format – directly via their Outlook clients quickly and conveniently as fax messages. The company also benefits from saving on its own fax hardware and software, as well as remarkably higher levels of process transparency.