I recently published an article in Telecom Reseller Magazine titled Cloud Communications: Fax as a Service. In the era of cloud computing and XaaS (where X = everything and anything), it’s easy to look at hosted communications services and proclaim (or reposition) them as a ‘CaaS’ offering. But what is XaaS really? The tech industry holds up SalesForce.com as the SaaS poster child. If SalesForce.com’s operational characteristics are applied to communications services, should the term CaaS only be applied to a communications service that is accessed solely through a browser interface with no client application software resident? Is that the purist definition of CaaS?

If so, then the field of puritanical CaaS offerings is probably quite narrow, but that probably doesn’t matter much in a practical sense. For what’s in a name? If the critical benefits of a hosted solution are realized by an enterprise customer, does it matter whether or not they adhere to a pure CaaS definition in order to be positioned as a cloud communication service? In the Telecom Reseller article, I reference multiple approaches our fax solution partners have implemented to introduce hosted fax service offerings to the market. Few of them could be defined as a pure ‘FaaS’ by the SalesForce.com standard. But all of them are providing cloud-based pay-as-you-go fax processing with strong value props. So are they FaaS? Maybe not to a XaaS Puritan, but to an enterprise looking to increase flexibility, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency and resilience, they are pure gold.