All About FoIP Blog

Pete Davidson of Davidson Consulting, well known fax technology industry analyst has shared with the AllAboutFoIP team and its website audience information about the OpenText acquisition of EasyLink..... There is plenty of buzz and blogs about what this will mean to the RightFax reseller channel, the fax server industry product landscape and current clients of RightFax and EasyLink.

On the heels of our beloved fax industry analyst forecasting in 2011 a 5-year expansion of FoIP, our blogging efforts last year remained cautious but encouraged by the rising interest and adoption of Fax over IP, adding complimentary articles, research and consulting on fax modernization, healthcare fax integration, SIP trunks, Cloud Fax solutions, Fax Workflow solutions, and even Steve Jobs.  In retrospect, we underestimated our own parent company’s success by doubling revenue over last year quarter-end.  Ultimately we owe it to smart customers who have wisely invested in “modernized” fax solutions, complimented by the momentum and mainstreaming of virtualization, IP infrastructures and IP telephony, and electronic document intelligence.....

Although the Fax Over IP industry does not have an industry conference event on its own yet, there are several notable events where one or more fax server vendors, industry analysts or development engineers can be found to learn more about the fax over IP, SIP faxing technology and products.

Today's paper intensive vertical markets are produce, government, healthcare, financial, legal, education and banking. Each sector contains one or more components which are regulated, requires communication with a variety of disparate organizations and paper production is mandatory. As the economy decides whether or not to recover, these markets are moving forward aggressively to reduce manual business processes, infrastructure and IT costs,through the Cloud, Server Virtualization and other means.

One Touch Global Technologies has been a long time presence in the e-document delivery, fax automation, workflow, fax server and fax over IP industry. It is now directly contributing to the enhancement of existing solutions with its One Touch Integration Server (OTIS) software. The One Touch Integration Server was developed to contribute success of BPA, BI and Go Green Initiatives.

In 2011, there was plenty of buzz surrounding the release of RightFax 10, the first full RightFax release since OpenText acquired Captaris several years prior. The results are coming in and previous RightFax clients looking for long needed under the hood improvements received their wish and more. Also in 2010, OpenText also acquired one of the worlds leading fax server vendors with Message Manager Solutions.

Dialogic Brooktrout SR14O is a dominate Fax Over IP software technology. It continues to participate in redefining the fax over IP transport solutions in a voice over IP built world. Dialogic Brooktrout is also an innovator with its other lines of business which include session border controllers, (SBC's) Media Gateways and more.

FaxBack & AudioCodes  have produced a fax ATA which uses HTTPS versus the PSTN or traditional FoIP. Combined with the FaxBack solution suite of products, this is a technology to watch for several reasons. Faxback has been a pioneer in Fax Over IP solutions years prior to its rapid wide spread adoption. 

The Fax Over IP (FoIP) industry continues to mature and make strides as discussion continue on the eventual sunset of the PSTN network. The Smart ATA™ with SmartFoIP™ technology from Commetrex and NetGen is important to the FoIP industry. Commetrex and NetGen have been committed to ensuring the reliability of fax over ip by working with international telecommunication carriers, IP services providers, end users, the SIP Forum and more.

On Oct 5, 2011, a technology maverick, marketing genius, warrior, and one of my dearest role models was lost. While reading the republished article "The Tale of Steve Jobs and the Five Dragons" (follow link below for access to the full story), I flashed back on my career in the fax server technology industry with pride and accomplishment.  In 2011, fax technology once again picks up speed at an astonishing rate.  Fax has evolved to find its place in the new era of Unified Messaging, Unified Communications, IP communications, Cloud computing and transactional document capture and delivery.  Rumor has it, Google and Microsoft both still use and need fax for a variety of business communications and processes.  The naysayers of the future of fax, both within the industry itself, and outsiders who don't have a clue, are unaware that their negative psychological investments, blogs and white paper omissions will never defeat such a simple and smart technology with words.  Comparatively so, it is not unlike the naysayers of Apple and NeXT who nearly wrote Steve Jobs and his ventures off in the 90's. The difference between naysayers and Steve Jobs is Vision.......