Cantata Technology ships one millionth fax port

Cantata Technology, the fax technology specialist, has shipped its one millionth fax port, with an estimated 500 billion fax pages transmitted worldwide via its Brooktrout-brand fax products over the past 15 years.

Laid end-to-end, 500 billion faxes would stretch for 313 875 273.647 kilometres, circle the earth 3 058 times and stretch from the earth to the sun.

"Companies use fax, not e-mail, for mission-critical documents," says Boudje Giljam, sales and marketing director at AmVia. "Fax more easily meets compliance issues because it's a safe transmission medium for point-to-point communication. That's one of the reasons why Brooktrout's fax boards have done so well in the South African market."

AmVia distributes Captaris's RightFax, which incorporates the Brooktrout boards and fax-over-IP technology, in southern Africa.

Cantata's Brooktrout has more than 70% of the global intelligent fax server market share.

"Despite the rise of e-mail and the Internet, the market for fax server revenues continues to grow at a steady rate of 8.2%. Fax remains an integral component of a wide range of document exchange processes in areas such as finance, legal, human resources and procurement," says Peter Davidson, president of Davidson Consulting, the leading independent authority on the fax industry. "Cantata's Brooktrout pioneered this market, and continues to lead the industry, not only in market share, but also with the latest technology advancements, such as real-time IP fax and host-based fax solutions."

"People are increasingly seeing the importance of fax since they realise that fax is a mission-critical service. As such, we continue to experience the upsurge in fax-related software sales that Davidson talks about," says Giljam.