Report Shows Business Benefits Of Fax To Email Service

As businesses strive to cut operating costs in order to stay competitive, many are finding that outsourcing their IT functions enables the company to not only work more efficiently, but to tap into advances in technology much faster. Faxing is one area where outsourcing and technology offer companies of all sizes a more economical and effective way to do business. A report titled “Fax Purchasing Decision: Fax Server or Fax Service?” conducted by Davidson Consulting, a Michigan-based market research and consulting firm for the fax industry, examines fax servers and online fax services. “The decision to go with a fax server or fax service can make a difference in how much control you feel you have over your faxing operations and can also impact the costs you incur,” the report states.

The report makes these three main conclusions about fax to email services:

More Businesses Are Turning To Internet Fax

Market research conducted in 2006 by Davidson Consulting finds the demand for fax servers increased 0.4%, while the demand for Internet fax services increased 26.4%. According to the report, “One reason that many enterprises decide to go with a service is because they don’t have the personnel to manage in-house servers and they want to lower the total cost of ownership of their fax solutions.”

Businesses Realize Multiple Benefits With Fax To Email

The report lists several primary benefits, among them improved fax management, enhanced privacy and automatic archiving that complies with the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other compliance regulations. The report concludes, “With a fax service, buyers have low up-front investment and gain the option of flexible costs depending on how much traffic volume they have. No software need be installed, since all operations take place off web interface. They offer virtually unlimited capacity, so if an enterprise has one mammoth fax job, it can be easily handled. Another important aspect of fax services is the pay-as-you-go pricing model. The per-fax cost does not vary with the volume, as is the case with a fax server, because of the fixed cost of the fax infrastructure.”

Fax Over Internet Has Less Hidden Costs Than Fax Servers

As the report points out, fax servers have numerous hidden expenses, among them server hardware and software maintenance costs, administrative costs for overseeing and troubleshooting the operation of the servers, monthly phone line fees and costs for technical support, service, or maintenance contracts. In contrast, fax to email has no underlying costs. According to the report, “Internet fax services offer all the same capabilities of fax servers without the hidden costs and without any requirement for fax boards.” Rather, FoIP (Fax over Internet protocol) saves on paper, ink, equipment, utility and waste removal expenses.