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Is it Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?

http://Enterprise.eFax.com (888) 532-9265

http://enterprise.efax.com/

All skills and resources…

http://Enterprise.eFax.com(888) 532-9265

In sports, business and all areas of life, skills diminish. Kareem Abdul Jabbar, center for the Los Angeles Lakers, played 20 years, 19 time all star, 6 time MVP, 6 time NBA champion.

When Kareem was in his prime, he was graceful, intimidating, and unstoppable on the basketball court.


… eventually diminish.


But by 1989, Kareem’s last year in the NBA, he lagged behind, playing less, and becoming the fourth scoring option on the team and a liability on defense.

It just goes to show that in sports—and technology and in life for that matter, Resources that you once depended on… can no longer do what you need them to do. Better options become available, and the old reliable system becomes too expensive to maintain.


“We can print right here in our office!”

“You won’t believe where I’m emailing you from.”


Just as Kareem was indispensable to the Lakers in the 1980s, so were dual floppy pcs, wheel impact prints, and blackberry email solutions to business productivity in the past 20 years. I bring up Kareem and reflect the parallel between his career – he was indispensable to the 1980s show time Lakers—and the technologies that I have used throughout my career.


“What did that thing do?”


But progress is inevitable. One day, a fax machine like this will look as old as these forms of communication do for us…

But would they be smart decisions today?


Innovation in Documents & Music


Hieroglyphics and Victrolas… Amazing advancements for their time…

5,000 years ago some Neanderthal got the notion to associate characters with meaning and chisel it into a rock…

Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, recording sound using a needle and a rotating cylinder…

These things did not represent the invention of documents and music, but were responsible for incredible advancements in their day.



More than a decade ago, the media hailed email as the end of fax. Paper was bad, it was reasoned, and email would quickly drive faxes and other paper-based documents to their demise.


The Devices Evolve


But think about it: wouldn’t it have been ridiculous in 1980—the year Kareem won his second NBA championship by the way—to suggest that music was going away because 8-tracks and cassette tapes were being supplanted by CDs?

We all know that it wasn’t music itself that was dying…



Just Disco.


But the demand for music remains.

Dark Ages Middle Ages

Our Age

The Devices Evolve


Like the need for music, transmitting documents securely and quickly remains a critical business need.

And like music, the devices continue to evolve.

Let’s put these devices and the mediums they represent into a bit of a time perspective:


Wall Street - 1987


Here billionaire Gordon Gecko is using the latest mobile phone technology to explaining to Bud Fox how the financial world operates. Money never sleeps!

When we saw this scene a quarter-century ago, would any of us have guessed…


Greed is Good


… that what we were really looking at was the future of portable music?



As exactly no one predicted, the future of portable music didn’t come from the Walkman…



But instead from the mobile phone. And any futurist who says that they predicted this phenomenon is using revisionist history.

The big brick mobile phone was not a multi-tasker.


And so it goes with fax.


This same separation of media and device applies to fax technology.


And so it goes with fax…


Would you believe that the thermographic fax was invented in 1846?

More than 30 years before Edison invented the phonograph and, interestingly, 30 years before Alexander Graham Bell invented the first practical telephone…there was fax.


And so it goes with fax…


In the late 1970s fax machines became a mass market product. Eventually their popularity waned…


And so it goes with fax.


And so in the 1990s fax was incorporated into Multi-Function Devices. Plain paper faxing and all in one devices put fax in the department and eventually at the desktop.



But People were still frustrated by waiting in lines, paper jams, poor image quality, slow transmission times, and they expressed their frustration openly, as the workers in the movie Office Space demonstrated.



At the same time, on the corporate side, to handle high-volume enterprise faxing, dedicated fax servers were placed in network server rooms… which centralized document rasterization and leveraged multiple phone lines in a trunk structure.

The model of one phone line–one fax machine…at least in the corporate world…became an obsolete model.


Fax servers made some aspects of fax communications management much easier, lowered the time consumption associated with it, and reduced the number of paper documents hanging around the office.

The Internet Changes Everything


At least for the companies that could afford the large price tag associated with them.

So why might fax servers be the next obsolete technology that bogs down your organization? VoIP is the paradigm-changing technology.



In the mid 2000s VoIP went mainstream, meaning voice quality was acceptable over the Internet. VoIP became the de facto standard for business telecommunications in companies large and small. The benefits included cost savings, easier administration, and global applicability. You didn’t need a PBX or analog phone lines to make business calls.


This change brought a new problem to fax: the need to attach fax boards directly to analog or T1 digital telephone line made VoIP deployment more complicated and expensive than it needed to be.



Telephony and Fax


Since its early mainstream usage, corporate fax has always been associated with telephony. Your company had a PBX system for managing calls and separate dedicated lines or trunks to transmit faxes.


So as VOIP came about, companies were faced with a choice: leave the fax server as the only service still connected to legacy analog telephone lines, or move the fax server to the Internet as well, requiring new gateways, software and implementation services.



FoIPt

SendingFax

Machine

GatewayTR1034-based

Fax Server

ReceivingFax Machine

IPPSTN

End-to-End T.30 Protocol Management

T.30 T.30 T.38 T.38


In turn, fax-server vendors needed to adjust, and so they developed FoIP –Fax over Internet Protocol and adopted a new transmission standard T.38 to supplant the T.30 analog fax standard.

The business could keep its server blades and software onsite, but instead of multiple phone lines, faxes would now be encrypted and sent over the Internet. This is called “digital faxing.”


is to…

is to…FoIP

as… Analog fax phone lines

The storage closet

Logically FoIP follows VoIP


It seemed to many IT professionals like the logical next step for their organization’s fax communications. Telco (PSTN) lines gave way to Voice over IP, so analog fax lines should give way to Fax over IP. However, this is not an optimal fax delivery method.


Remember the music...


Until very recently, it was logical for you to guess that as the Walkman had evolved into the CD player…and digital music storage further evolved to a highly compressed format like mp3… the most popular model for portable music today would be the iPod and similar devices.


Music isn’t about the device


But of course if you follow this logic, you’d be wrong.

Like FoIP fax servers can send transmissions via the Internet, MP3 players can service the need for portable music from the Internet.


Streaming Content

z


The most popular way to enjoy music is to have it delivered over the Internet, and to play it on your smart phone—iTunes, Spotify and Pandora are all the growing backbone of the music delivery industry.

Gordon Gecko had it right.


Cloud Computing


And just as with music, with fax the device itself is not as important as the service. With cloud-based faxing, you can send and receive faxes over email or through a web browser – from your computer, tablet or yes, even your smart phone.


Cloud Fax Solutions

The paradigm shift is not the device, it’s the delivery. You don’t purchase the music hardware and buy the music software, you subscribe to the music service and listen on any device you like.

Similarly, fax has moved from a device that you buy, house and maintain… to an Internet-based subscription model.

You don’t buy the fax server hardware, and pay for the transmission lines, you simply subscribe to the cloud service and pay for the use.



FAX SERVERS vs. INTERNET FAXINGCentralized build or de-centralized? How many channels? Systems integration?

NONE

Multiple points of failure in architecture; labor-intensive diagnosis

NONE

No server back-up; expensive, complex expansions and upgrades NONE

Coordination issues between email and fax server NONE

Network redundancy / fault tolerance YES

Ongoing administration, reports, maintenance YES

Hosted Fax Service


While underlying technology behind hosted fax servers and FoIP is the same, there are substantial differences when you look at how the service works and benefits.

o no dedicated hardware, no software or paper are neededo no upfront investment or ongoing support and maintenance costso Pay as you go


Now consider your current fax infrastructure…..

Whether you’re still using traditional standalone fax machines or a fax server, it might be time to update your solution.




You may not look as outdated as this fellow, but you might still be experiencing productivity loss and resource drains.


My Organization’s Fax Profile

Here are some measurable self-evaluation questions:

1. How many faxes does my organization send on a typical day?

2. Is the load balanced or do we have peaks and valleys?

3. Do we have a backup plan for unexpected server

downtime?

4. Is our organization distributed?

5. Is our telephony plan stable, or are we planning service

changes?

6. What are our monthly fax expenses? (Incl. phone lines,

ink, maintenance, etc.) http://Enterprise.eFax.com(888) 532-9265



1. How many faxes does your organization send each day? Once the infrastructure is in place the actual document flow goes unnoticed until the fax traffic strains capacity of the server. Fax servers require constant monitoring of system capacity and throughput to ensure the solution is right-sized for your organization.



Is It Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?2. Is your fax volume constant or do you have peaks and valleys? Owning the equipment and infrastructure for faxing means that you need to purchase hardware and bandwidth that can accommodate your highest usage level. With large usage fluctuations, you may have faxing overhead, capable of a much higher volume than it is used for.



Is it Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?3. Do you have a backup plan for server downtime? The adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” is familiar to IT directors. For fax servers, it is advisable to have a second back-up server and a rerouting option for telephony issues, expensive components, because faxes are quite often time sensitive transactions. If you don’t have a backup plan with appropriate service outage contingencies, business-critical documents may be delayed or go undelivered.




4. Is your organization distributed? If you have remote salespeople, work from home employees and/or multiple office locations, then having fax services in one location may not be the most efficient—or most reliable—system for you.



Is it Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?5. Is your telephony environment stable or dynamic?With sound quality equal or exceeding equivalent public switched telephone networks (PSTN), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for voice communications has been adopted by over 80% of companies. However, if you have already made the switch to VoIP—or are in the process of doing so—continuing to support an in-house fax server will mean maintaining otherwise unnecessary telephony costs.




Is it Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?6. What is your cost for each page faxed? Measuring the costs can be convoluted: hardware and software maintenance, electricity, telephony lines or IP gateways, employee time for maintenance and management. Similarly, your actual cost per transmission may higher than you would suspect. With hosted fax services this number is much easier to obtain and control.



Once you have a better understanding of your own fax environment, you can consider the benefits of a hosted fax solution, with features and integrations suited to your needs. \

Sending or receiving faxes can be initiated from the applications that end-users already use, including Microsoft Outlook or Office, or even from Enterprise-wide systems like SAP, easing the implementation (minutes to a couple of days).



A hosted service can accommodate Desktop faxing—typically individual transactions to and from individual users, Production Faxing--Sending the same document to thousands of recipients simultaneously, and Application Faxing—API for sending or receiving customized template documents to thousands of recipients.


There are many other features that can be selected to accommodate transport security, fax archiving, and mobile devices.



Is it time to retire your fax servers?

I’ll leave that for you to decide, but at least now you know that there are newer technologies available that offer a practical solution to transmitting documents.



Thank you for your time.

Is it Time to Retire Your Fax Servers?Tim Dubes

[email protected]


mailto:[email protected]


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