Seven reasons to include fax in IP architecture

One technology that is often overlooked when companies transition to VOIP networks is fax. The expected growth of fax over IP (FOIP) sales between now and 2010 is 50% per year.

Corporate networks are increasingly evolving to support voice, video and data applications on a single network infrastructure. According to research firm Gartner, 91% of all corporate telephone sales are expected to be IP-capable by 2009.

By migrating fax communications to converged IP architectures, companies enjoy many advantages over legacy analogue or time division multiplexed (TDM) fax. The centralised and fault-tolerant nature of IP fax servers:

* Reduces phone bills by driving long-distance fax traffic over IP;
* Eliminates costs of maintaining analogue private branch exchange (PBX) ports;
* Dramatically reduces network administrative costs;
* More easily provides fax services to all employees regardless of location;
* Lowers the cost of disaster preparedness associated with fax technology;
* Consolidates remote fax servers in a central location; and
* Eliminates analogue fax machines.

One of the primary reasons so many organisations are investigating the properly architected FOIP system is that it saves them a great deal of money. FOIP enables companies to make phone and fax calls essentially free of public switched telephone network (PSTN) charges. For example, the cost of sending a long distance six-page fax at 60c per page is R3.60.

Route that same fax over an IP network and it virtually eliminates long-distance fees. Multiply that by the thousands of faxes sent every month and the savings quickly add up. As the market adoption of IP fax grows, savings will increase even more because a greater percentage of faxes will travel from start to finish via IP, bypassing the PSTN altogether.

Another major benefit is the exchange. By switching to FOIP systems, companies can reduce the maintenance costs of PBX station ports, which are much higher than the maintenance costs of routers. FOIP fax servers no longer require connectivity to PBXs and are instead connected to gateways.

Simple economies of scale apply: Global PBX maintenance contracts range from R1 400 to R2 100 per port, while router maintenance contracts are typically less than R800 a port.

Multiple network topologies and disparate network technologies increase the level of management complexity. As networks have become increasingly ubiquitous, companies have been forced to manage separate data and telephone networks, each using radically different technologies and requiring different technical skill sets and knowledge.

With IP communications technologies, companies can now eliminate the legacy telephone network and combine all communications modes, including fax, in a single network topology. This convergence of networks enables companies to reduce employee headcount and transition phone and fax services to data networks.

Traditionally, providing fax services to employees in remote locations required on-site fax servers that are cost-justified by large user bases. However, with an IP fax server, employees can access the fax image and signal processing capability that resides in a remote data centre.

The field office gateway is the link to the public switched telephone network. Adding remote offices to an IP fax server is a matter of software configuration. With IP fax, a remote employee in Bloemfontein can use the company's fax server in Johannesburg as easily as if it were in their own office. As companies implement gateways at remote locations and centralise voice and fax services, they're able to leverage their network infrastructure to route calls between office locations at the lowest cost.

VOIP network architectures allow servers to be independently located of users, allowing companies to consolidate fax servers down to one or two strategically located data centres. This simplifies disaster planning and preparedness by reducing the number of sites that need rapid response capability, and enables companies to locate the fax server in the most secure and stable environments.

The migration to IP communications is taking place at the same time that companies are focusing their efforts and investment on IT infrastructure to resolve thorny operational and compliance issues. As companies look to make the switch to IP communications, most are also considering how these acquisitions can assist them with compliance, business process automation, and document management.

Fax server technology sits squarely at the intersection of communications, document management, business process automation and compliance. The shift to IP communications, combined with the increased focus on business process automation and document management, makes the IP fax server an excellent option as companies accelerate their IP communications plans.