Recently, at the ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2010 show in Los Angeles, TMC’s Erin Harrison had the opportunity to sit down and interview Faxcore’s Senior Vice President, Max Schroeder, who noted that “the real news in Fax Over IP is in related technologies.”

Schroeder noted that their FoIP product was recently certified with Exchange 2010, which is official now. “The exciting thing about FoIP isn’t necessarily sending a fax, but having everything be part of a converged network -- fax, voice, e-mail, everything combined.”

He said there is a lot of progress in adoption of FoIP in the industry, in which “We’re working with a group called the I3 Forum, over a billion phone numbers over 80 countries, to identify any issues over carrier networks and resolve them.”

When asked how he would answer somebody who questions whether fax is really relevant today, Schroeder said those who ask such questions assume that e-mail is going to replace fax. The first time he was asked that was in Melbourne in 1990, he noted, adding that the first commercial fax was in the mid-1800s, so “it’s been around a long time. It’s an image, not an e-mail.”

But the big difference is that fax is a legal document around the world and e-mail is not. For Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and other compliance issues, faxes are considered legal, and e-mails are not.

Schroeder said Faxcore sells exclusively through resellers, and said as far as what’s coming up for Faxcore, they’ll be making additions to the product line -- “I can’t really say now” -- but to look for updated Faxcore applications. The industry is moving towards managed service providers, and he said Faxcore’s moving more towards that direction.