On-premise or cloud? It seems this question is at the heart of every platform or technology choice these days, and the world of enterprise fax is no different.

At this stage you may be asking the question. What enterprise uses fax these days in the era of instant messaging?

Well surprisingly many in fact, and the exchange of documents by fax is still crucial in Purchase to Pay and Order to Cash processes for many large organisations. Fax remains a leading choice for its capacity to confirm transmissions, handle large files, and dispense audit trails. 

A recent survey of US healthcare institutions by OpenText found that many still rely heavily on faxed documents due to their legal properties and ubiquity, but traditional faxing creates a lot of paper that is difficult to track and vulnerable to tampering.

The fax medium shows no signs of disappearing into the museum of obsolete telecommunications protocols like telex and the telegram.

Industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and transportation rely heavily on fax over IP services – with the market for servers projected to grow at 10.9 percent CAGR to $US360 million in 2016, according to analyst firm Davidson Consulting.

Fax communications actually has its roots in the telegraph era in the 1840s, however it was the invention of fax over IP and virtual, software-only solutions that secured its future

The world of enterprise fax solutions got smaller with the 2011 acquisition of Message Manager and the 2012 acquisition of EasyLink by Enterprise Information Management (EIM) giant OpenText. EasyLink’s hosted fax over IP service is now offered as part of an offering known as the OpenText Cloud.

OpenText’s on-premise solution called RightFax is currently the dominant network fax solution for the corporate and government market. Other competitors in this space include Esker and Biscom.

Australia and New Zealand’s largest RightFax reseller Axient offers what it terms a Hybrid FaxCloud (HFC) solution for IP Telephony and fax.

This architecture promises to reduce telephony costs by up to 50% and simplify fax telecommunications. A RightFax IP fax server is installed on-premise to integrate with email, desktop, CRM, ERP, document management, imaging, archival systems but the telephony is in the cloud.

“There are still many organisation today that are faced with the challenge of reducing cost and simplifying their fax systems,” said Mark Howarth, Axient Managing Director.

RightFax provides a multitude of options to capture and route inbound documents when they enter the enterprise and to connect and integrate with imaging, workflow and archive systems.

Axient customers in Australia and New Zealand are utilising the Hybrid FaxCloud (HFC) solution for functions such as sales order processing, trade settlement processing, online customer service and accounts receivable processing.

"The Hybrid FaxCloud was easy to implement, reduced our telecommunications infrastructure and simplified our ongoing fax management for all of our 120 Australian locations,” said Adrian Moore-Crouch, Chief Information Officer at Advanced Personnel Management.

Tel: 1300 840 945 (Australia) 0800 898 881 (NZ) info@axient.com.au