According to South Africa’s tech journal site, Vox Amvia has announced Stratus, which company officials describe as “a new cloud-based fax as a service” offering designed for SMBs.
“Rumours of the death of fax are greatly exaggerated,” says Craig Freer of Vox Amvia, the enterprise fax specialist in the Vox Telecom group. That’s certainly true -- no unified communications suite is really complete without it. Fax is still used widely for legal purposes as well as practical ones that email can’t handle.
“Fax is still a critical tool for many businesses,” Freer said, “because it delivers security, auditing and tracking that email can’t match. That’s why documents like purchase orders, invoices, loan applications and the like are still routinely transmitted by fax.”
But we understand part of the problem for companies, why they, especially SMBs, kind of want fax to be dead and gone. As Freer noted, yes, distributing, securing, storing and archiving paper faxes has always been a nightmare.
But that’s also why clever minds have been working on ways to make it better. And they have. Fax server technology “allows companies to meet stringent security requirements, “says Freer explaining that “you get a complete audit trail showing exactly who has received, viewed, forwarded or deleted a fax.”
A good fax server can do things your father’s fax machine couldn’t do. For one thing, you can route faxes directly to the correct person or business application, even if the company is only using one fax number. No more papers falling on the floor out of the fax machine behind a receptionist too busy talking on the phone to pay attention.
Perhaps most attractive to SMBs, however, is that with hosted options, “there is no upfront capital investment and people pay only for what they use,” as Freer says. As with subscribing to a hosted service in general, you also always have the most up-to-date version of the software available without the hassles of updating, renewing licenses, patching or whatnot.
So bring fax back as part of the enterprise-wide document management process. Another difference: Today they can be stored in searchable form in an archive. “It makes finding an old fax as easy as finding an old email, using any search engine,” as Freer says.
See? Much better than what you thought.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Juliana Kenny