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.

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.

SIP adoption and implementation is rapidly increasing at all levels. The buzz around Internet Fax, Cloud Faxing and FoIP industries is SIP centered. Many consider the future of fax (not just fax over IP) revolves around SIP. The most common questions we are receiving at AllAboutFoIP.com are, "Who are the best SIP Trunk Providers for fax? Does SIP Peering matter with FoIP? Where do I turn if I have SIP interoperability issues? What are the best troubleshooting tools to use?"

 

All the buzz is “fax modernized.”  Fax modernized is everywhere from Unified Communications to Cloud Computing to Microsoft Office 365.  1H-2011 illustrates that electronic fax defies knee-jerk perceptions, surprising exo-analysts like Frost & Sullivan, who abrubtly see what industry insiders like us have always known, that enterprise and traditional fax markets continue to grow and redefine themselves amidst global IT paradigm shifts.  Like the wheel, it was invented a long time ago and is still a damn good solution, constantly enjoying improvements.

What is Fax Modernized? 

Fax modernized is a mature form of electronic document exchange.  It reigns as an undisputed front runner for compliance, cost-reduction and consolidation initiatives, and simply represents the evolution of faxing away from traditional fax machines towards evolving document exchange networks including multi-functional digital onramps (MFP Faxing), locally encrypted network attached scanners (Fujitsu 1800N-OTIS), and secure electronic document exchange, rarely originated or terminated as paper.  All the same, electronic document exchange still hangs its hat on proven, reliable and evolving secure transmission methods in the families of PSTN, Fax over IP (FoIP), http over SSL (https and https fax) and alternative modes of secure file transfer.

AllAboutFoIP.com, the #1 enterprise FoIP technology information resource on the internet announces Q3 launch of TMCNET.COM Fax Server Channel. The TMCNET.COM channel scheduled to launch in August will help AllAboutFoIP.com continue its mission of increasing FoIP industry awareness and value to vendor partners, IT specialists, VoIP and Telecom resellers, IP Communications consultants, Service providers and their clients…..

Unified Communications, commonly known as UC, is the centralized collaboration (and in some cases consolidation) of media and messaging, real-time or otherwise, transactional or otherwise. UC continues to drive the intermingling of domestic and international economies while simultaneously refining the rules, laws and requirements of office space and the virtual workplace..........

On Thursday, April 28, 2011, Cisco held a Facebook forum on Fax Over IP. The event was brought to our attention by the CEO of Satori Solutions Chris Schultz. The CISCO online Facebook Support Comminity forum brought in David Hanes. Mr. Hanes fax over IP (foiP) background is extensive. With more than 10 years of experience David is a CCIE, Cisco press author on Fax Over IP (FoIP) and the co-author of the Cisco Press book, Fax, Modem, and Text for IP Telephony".

 

Speaking from the perspective of a 20 year fax industry veteran and company founder, One Touch Global credits RightFAX as a key influence in its history and substantial participation surrounding the fax server space through 2011 and beyond.  Fax technology, now morphing gradually away from stand alone fax machines, finds its futuristic home using digital on-ramp solutions, multifunction devices, and IP Telephony (IPT).  In other words, electronic fax remains deceptively successful and highly relevant for years to come.

The RightFAX brand continues to stand out, namely a by-product of .....

Davidson Consulting, the ground hog of the fax technology industry, has published its new report appropriately titled FoIP Server Markets.   The name change from Fax Server to FoIP Server reinforces the trend of IP, VoIP and Cloud infrastructure and its applications in the fax technology market.  The report research indicates the FoIP Server markets will expand during the next five-year period, and industry anticipated revenue will grow.....

 

Dear FoIP Technology Providers and Analysts,

In October of 2010, merely 6 months ago, the first release of www.AllAboutFoIP.com was launched for the purpose of providing an un-biased and consolidated Fax over IP (FoIP) information resource, and for serving the growing industry as a whole.  Search engine rankings on a wide-variety of fax industry related terms continue to elevate and astound us.  We estimate that AllAboutFoIP.com already experiences roughly 36,000 pageviews per month, a majority from organic searches and referrals. In December, we launched our bi-monthly newsletter with a distribution list already approaching 10,000 recipients, with additional press releases providing worldwide exposure.

 

It is 2011, and faxing in the healthcare market continues to check out in great shape as hospitals, insurers, payment processors, laboratories, and medical product manufacturers all use fax servers and fax services to move documents confidentially.  With fax servers and fax services, documents typically arrive in secure fax to e-mail or fax client applications, or directly into healthcare management systems, so no one can read patient information except authorized users.  Fax immediately converts paper documents into electronic documents at the source.

If you do a Google search on Cloud Faxing, most of the entries, including the sponsored links will reveal fax to email companies or an up and coming crop of hosted fax server solutions. These are all viable options and represent components of Cloud Faxing. etherFAX redefines the term Cloud Faxing by giving clients the best of both worlds with the addition of a multi-level encryption/security system known as a "defense-in-depth" conceived by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Moving to a FoIP solution provides a very natural gateway to Server Virtualization, which by itself meets many companies' goals for reducing power and heat toward their "Green" initiatives. The move to Server Virtualization also provides organizations with an entire new set of options for Disaster Recovery and High Availability.

The ability to truly centralize a Network Fax Server solution and avoid distributed architectures is another significant driver that leads many organizations to consider FoIP. By migrating to a FoIP solution we can eliminate the need for physical connectivity directly to the telecom network via traditional local Time-Division Multiplexed (TDM) circuit and eliminate geographical infrastructure constraints.

One debate that arises in many enterprises is whether the business wants to use a FoIP (fax over IP) server or hosted Internet fax service. This debate turns on the performance of servers versus services and on the relative costs for each, along with how important the information on the faxes is.

In the abstract, fax servers and fax services do the same things. They enable businesses to send, receive and manage faxes. But in the real world, differences do exist. First, FoIP servers generally can do more than typical hosted fax services. FoIP servers generally boast a number of APIs (application programming interfaces) which means that businesses can customize the fax servers to work tightly with any of their applications. Second, more FoIP servers support production faxing (the ability to send out a batch of faxes and have every one be different in its specifics, so thousands of invoices or purchase orders can be sent out automatically), whereas this kind of capability is a rarity among fax services, which also generally don’t provide security on their lines. Also, FoIP servers generally have tighter integration with various external systems, like Microsoft Sharepoint for instance.

Many organizations have adopted a VoIP (Voice over IP) network infrastructure, or in some cases began a partial transition from traditional phone lines to IP, and thus are already reaping the 5 primary benefits of a unified communications strategy. A unified communications strategy involves the migration of primary business communication methods such as voice, data, video and fax from traditional analog phone lines onto an IP-based network, including the internet. Terms commonly used as a part of these unified communication migrations are VoIP (voice over IP) & FoIP (fax over IP).

Fax machines, fax servers and fax services continue to evolve towards a Fax over IP (FoIP) strategy, and FoIP will become the future of fax communications. As the Fax over IP (FoIP) industry matures, Fax over IP (FoIP) will become cheaper, faster, and easier to use, while dramatically enhancing consolidation and business continuance initiatives.

While there are thousands of sites and products dedicated to understanding voice transmission over an IP network (VoIP) and the internet, there are very few which discuss Fax over IP (FoIP). As a key fax server industry advocate, fax insider and reseller for 20 years, the goal of the "All About FoIP" website is to provide valuable information regarding Fax over IP (FoIP) for business executives and technology professionals to make well informed decisions.