Businesses of all sizes are actively migrating their communication platforms from traditional networks to IP based solutions. In fact, Fax over IP or FoIP is expected to exceed $340 Million dollars by the end of 2011. So what is driving this movement?
There are several good reasons why firms should migrate fax to the IP network.
First and foremost are the economic reasons. One of the major advantages of a converged network is the ability to make voice and fax calls free of the public switched telephone network, or PSTN. If you can eliminate the entire long distance charge or a large part of it, you are saving real dollars. Second, you can reduce the maintenance costs of the PBX because router ports are cheaper to maintain than PBX ports. Third, as companies merge their voice and data networks, Fax is one area that is overlooked or forgotten. But, the marginal cost associated with fax on an IP network will grow. What do we mean by marginal cost?
Specifically when a company decides to merge their voice and data network
s, they often fail to consider fax. This requires some type of retrofitting of stand-alone fax machines and multi-function devices to reside on an IP network. Additional equipment needs to be purchased but worse, is the protocol used by these analog devices is often G.711, a voice protocol.
Traditional fax transmits using T.30. This doesn't
work over an IP network. FoIP requires T.38. If the consolidated voice and data network wasn't designed to include T.38 fax transmissions, then you are going to pay the price. So, the marginal cost, or the cost to retrofit fax into the new IP network increases if you don't design for fax up front.
By consolidating voice and data onto a single network, companies are saving money on infrastructure, personnel and training costs, reducing long distance charges and lowering PBX maintenance costs.
The second key reason firms are migrating to FoIP is to reap savings related to disaster recovery. The disaster recovery cost savings are actually a benefit of virtualization, not FoIP per se. However, virtualization of fax servers is only possible by implementing FoIP. Traditionally, users have had to maintain two completely independent sets of hardware in order to insure business continuity. In comparison, a single virtual machine can be duplicated in a disaster recovery facility through the use of snapshots and SAN replication.
Finally, compliance is a primary driver to FoIP. Today, stand alone fax machines and most multifunction devices aren't on the IP network. Employees can send and receive faxes without any audit trail or adherence to regulations like HIPAA, SEC Rule 17a or Sarbanes Oxley. A network fax server allows people to send and receive faxes from their desktop, from within their mail client and by integrating the MFP into the fax system. So, I can walk up to the MFP, scan a paper document and either fax it from there by accessing the fax server's phone book or go back to my desk and add other documents to the fax and send it all together. All of this is logged by the fax server. On the inbound side, faxes can be automatically routed to a person or to a department without anyone else seeing the contents. We can also automatically route faxes into a document management system which increases rules based compliance. Of course, we can do this today with our fax software but the ability to use FoIP by our customer's increases compliance by employees in remote branch offices because they are all using the same fax resource using the same standards and rules.
The opportunity to further optimize your firm's infrastructure can be enabled and enhanced by a FoIP migration. Whether you seek cost savings, enhanced workflow or adherence to compliance, FoIP is one solution that business small and large should embrace.
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