Companies such as FaxCore see this kind of thing all the time: A Cisco (News - Alert) reseller, say, needs to provide legacy fax products to customers who won’t be implementing their Cisco systems for at least six months, probably a year.  

Offering not-too-expensive products for situations like this, FaxCore (News - Alert) officials say they’re good with Fax over IP, sure, but also with analog, digital, integration with legacy PBXs, whatever situation you need them to walk into.

Surprised that in these days of FoIP there’s a vendor who still does a lot of business with analog lines, PRI and T1 digital?

You shouldn’t be. Fax over IP is growing fast, sure, but some customers aren’t fully VoIP and UC capable. Plus many customers will be implementing VoIP in the near future but need to have analog now, and need a vendor who can work with them on that.

Which is where companies such as FaxCore come in, to help with that gradual migration, bridging the gap between legacy and IP-based systems.

“No matter how innovative the unified communications product, it has to help customers migrate, not rip-and-replace, and prompt gradual infrastructure evolution, not overnight change,” notes industry observer Chad Berndtson.

Officials of FaxCore see that one of their special selling points – the ability to migrate easily from legacy to IP and UC.

And it’s a good place to be – UC service revenues will rise to reach over $17 billion by 2013, a new study by market research firm In-Stat (News - Alert) has found.

According to the report, “Global Unified Communications Emerges from the Cloud,” there are two trends that are really working to enhance UC and spur its uptake in the marketplace.

As more and more businesses look to save money and still keep their businesses functioning in weakened economy, TMC (News - Alert) has written recently, “organizations are increasingly turning to unified communications. Whether looking to improve access to information or to speed up communications, UC quite simply is changing the way companies do business.”