Yaphank, New York's ECCT sells credit union technology, specifically IT services and systems integration, and provides full-time IT management for many financial institutions, typically ranging from 20 to 200 users.

 

Faxing, according to ECCT officials, is "the ideal method for handling business-critical and potentially sensitive information common in the financial industry."

 

Yes, faxing - it's still around. In fact ECCT uses the Open Text Fax Appliance, FaxPress Edition with their clients.

 

Since their clients usually deploy products that handle from 50 to 500 faxes per day, Fax Appliance was "ideal" for ECCT, company officials say: "Open Text's all-in-one approach to network faxing combines the hardware and software in one complete offering, which translates into cost and time savings for the client. Familiar Windows-based interfaces, as well as e-mail, address book and business application integration dramatically reduces the steps employees take in their fax transactions."

Because ECCT works primarily with financial institutions that deal with sensitive information, security is crucial, as you might imagine. With Fax Appliance, senders can fax confidential information directly from their computers, right from the application they're working in, ECCT officials explain, adding that for added security, "departmental computers receiving inbound faxes can be password-protected, accessible only to authorized individuals within the department, and configured with built-in security policies."

 

Read more here.

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"Anything that makes IT faster, more efficient, or less labor-intensive is going to be a hit, both with IT professionals and their bosses," writes industry observer Holly Dolezalek in one of the least controversial sentences you'll read this week. 

Disagree with that and, well, you have issues you probably need to address.

FrontRange Solutions is building a software stable along those lines, Dolezalek writes, aimed at the makes service management, customer service, and asset management software markets. According to Kevin Smith, FrontRange's vice president of products, "the sweet spot for its IT business is organizations with between 500 and 5,000 employees.

 

For the CRM and customer service market, it's organizations with between 50 and 2,000 employees," she says:

 

"We find that we're a good fit for health care, education, government, retail organizations, and financial institutions," Smith says.

 

Read more here.

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Always nice to see businesses working to help charities. Eagle Conferencing recently had the opportunity to assist the nearly 30-year-old Child Rights and You, a non-profit organization working with 200-plus grassroots organizations in over 2,500 villages and slums across 18 states in India, promoting "sustainable change," and addressing "the root causes that keep them hungry, illiterate, exploited and abused."

CRY officials say they partner grassroots-level Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs, working with children, their parents, and local communities. They say they wanted, "a suitable telecommunication conferencing partner in India, and selected Eagle Conferencing as their partner of choice."

 

Primary drivers for this vendor selection, according to CRY officials, were Eagle's generous "offer for free services to avoid their capital and operating costs, network reliability, and an enormous infrastructure capacity of ten billion minutes of annual global conferencing bridge."

Eagle Conferencing officials say they provided the global electronic platform with reservationless call and instant-activation capabilities, adding that these business tools "help them to connect parties immediately without wasting any logistical time."

 

Read more here.

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All right, all you early adopters of VoIP, you hardy pioneers who paved the way for the rest of us, deep thanks. Well done. Thanks to you, the bumps have been smoothed out, the ruts filled in and the kinks, um, ironed out.

 

As industry observer Carmi Levy says, you early-adopting, sod-busting trailblazers looking for voice-only cost savings "are now being joined by a broader cross-section of enterprises looking for more."

And although as Levy says choosing the right product isn't as simple or straightforward as it once was (back when there were fewer options, fewer possibilities and less complicated features), "the selection process need not be onerous."

 

Increasingly, Levy writes, "advanced integrated VoIP and unified communications now do more than just deliver inexpensive voice service. They drive multimedia collaboration and let companies of any size take advantage of cost-effective, sophisticated services that were formerly the exclusive domain of the largest shops."

 

Read more here.