Last week I ranted a bit about the opportunities we have in front of us today in this industry. I even said I'd write a blog about how fax isn't boring - which is this blog.

As you probably know, Dialogic has been a CTI fax leader for years, and we are committed to leading the way with fax over IP (FoIP). We have a diverse and knowledgeable customer base. Maybe I'm a bit prejudiced. But there is a lot of stuff going on with fax.

First let's explore why people find fax boring. Number one, in my estimation, is that people don't think there is much faxing going on anymore. I remember when I used to come to work and one of the things I'd do in the morning was go to the fax machine to see if any faxes came in for me. We used to get "junk faxes" much like junk mails of today, but we also would get faxes from customers, etc. Typically, there would be at least one fax a day waiting. But no more. So people think there's no faxing going on.

Hey, just because you don't get a fax at work like you used to doesn't mean people aren't doing it. In fact, in a March 2009 report, Gartner estimated that "the use of fax servers in the enterprise space will increase by as much as 80 percent by 2012." Clearly, they're not just going to make that up - something must be going on.

So what is going on? First of all, go look at your printer. It's probably an MFP. And you can do faxing there. I have sent and received some faxes from it. But why? Why not just an e-mail? Fax is still important for complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. That's a key reason. And fax is part of a larger document management scheme, which is important for the overall record keeping. And there are still people who place orders with fax. I've seen them on the MFP I use at work! So with the growth of unified communications which, I should remind you, means "unifying all communications," including fax, there is action here with regard to insuring fax is a part of that.

And we still use fax at home sometimes. Some of the health care organizations require faxing, especially regarding prescriptions, so we fax. Now, we are a full IP into and out of the house, so the fax we do at home is over IP. We sometimes have problems, probably because the provider we use is trying to use G.711 over IP. So we have to resend and resend at times. That's where T.38 FoIP comes in. This is also where some action is in the industry. It's more robust than G.711. So the service providers are now waking up to this "nuisance" and working to resolve this. Fax is an important part of customer satisfaction.

So there you have it. It may not have the “wow” factor of a cool mobile video application, but fax is something that’s a key communications vehicle in certain segments — it’s a solid money maker and that’s certainly not boring!