BANGALORE: Merit Systems, a software development company, has launched its
latest email to fax gateway product, GIFTefax. It integrates the email network
to the fax system and claims to provide an economic and convenient solution for
an enterprise communication requirement.
"Despite the proliferation of the Internet, people rely on fax as an
integral part of office communication. Hence, we took up the challenge of
extending the convenience and cost effectiveness of email network to fax
communications," said B S Gopal Rao, managing director, Merit Systems.
"Using this product would mean receiving all your communication, be it an
email or a fax, at your desktop. Furthermore, since the process is totally
automated, it eliminates the need for printing and manually faxing. This would
lead to significant cost savings in the long run."
Functionally, GIFTefax uses email backbone for fax communications. A fax
message would originate as an email from the GIFTefax subscriber’s system and
would travel via the Internet and arrive as a fax at the destination system or
the fax machine. Should a company executive be travelling, he could save on the
cost of sending overseas faxes by routing the message through his local GIFTefax
server to the recipient fax machine, thus incurring only the cost of a local
call.
Gopal said, "A recent survey showed that 50 per cent of an executive’s
time is spent searching for prior communications and messages. There is also the
frustration of not being able to locate that crucial piece of information due to
distributed means of receiving and sending communications. GIFTefax will change
this so that a company can save time and resources."
With GIFTefax incoming fax can be received as an email into one or more
mailboxes. An incoming fax message can also be automatically copied to a mailbox
for archiving purposes, if required.
Established in 1995, Bangalore-based Merit Systems has engineered a series of products, namely GIFTefax, GIFTultemail, httpGIFT, ftpGIFT and pop@GIFT, primarily in the communications segment.