March 1998

"Universal Everything"
FUTURE FAX DEVELOPMENTS

BY JOHN TAYLOR

The market for computer-based fax is strong and growing. And, along with growth comes change. Today’s fax technologies, like voice technologies before them, are quickly migrating to more modular and open hardware. Tomorrow’s fax systems will be "universal everything" systems — just one part of the same unified, well-managed net-work that also handles voice communications. Instead of depending on expensive, dedicated (and dead-end) hardware, next-generation fax technologies will rely on improvements to software. The result will be tremendous savings in PBX systems, in management resources, and in the high price companies now pay to transmit fax over standard telephone lines.

FAX REACHES CRITICAL MASS
Fax systems are no longer an option. Over the last decade, fax has matured into an essential tool for doing business, as common as lights or telephones. Market studies show that fax usage has grown at a break-neck pace that won’t soon slow down. The number of pages faxed each year is expected to have doubled from about 350 million in 1996 to more than 700 million worldwide by 2000 (Source: IDC, 1997).

Although fax usage is growing steadily worldwide, the growth is most dramatic in Asia. By 2000, Asia will fax some 325 million pages per year — nearly half the worldwide total (Source: IDC, 1997). Cultural considerations are one reason for the tremendous popularity of fax in Asia. Although they are complex, with numerous regional and cross-country dialects, Asian languages are much more graphical that European languages — making written communication via fax an efficient alternative to voice communication. Sending fax communications can also help minimize the difficulties of communicating across time zones, another consideration in Asian markets.

In Asia, as in the rest of the world, all this fax usage adds up to big business. The cost of the fax systems themselves is only the beginning. The real expense behind most fax transmission is the cost of using telephone lines — often at the highest per-minute rates of the day. The average mid-sized company spends an astounding $37 million each year on telephone expenses, with about 41 percent of that expense dedicated to the cost of fax transmission (Source: Pitney Bowes Gallup Study, 1996).

Market statistics also show that companies are moving away from fax servers and toward software-based solutions. The market for Windows NT fax server software grew 10-fold between 1995 and 1997, in both revenue and the number of ports in use (Source: IDC, 1997). Today, only about 20 percent of fax transmissions are generated from the desktop, with the rest coming from shared fax machines. Instead of having individual users fax from their desks, companies are finding it makes sense to use their fax servers to manage their overall fax traffic.

UNIVERSAL EVERYTHING
The progression to software-based fax technologies is a natural one. In a world where technologies come and go and a company’s communication sys-tem develops over a long period of time, there comes a point when a company must decide how to turn a collection of diverse, often incompatible technologies and equipment into a single, unified communications system that maximizes existing resources and optimizes efficiency and costs.

The Problem
Today, companies are finding them-selves with an inefficient collection of separate, self-contained fax systems that must vie with equally self-contained voice mail systems for space on the same PBX. For example, a company taking a fresh look at its PBX resources might find significant periods during the day when the lines dedicated to fax are not being used. At the same time, the lines dedicated to voice communications are probably quiet all night. When the company needs to expand, it has two choices: add expensive PBX resources, or find a way to get more use from the resources it already has — by managing voice and fax on the same network and sending fax transmissions when the voice lines are quiet.

The Transition
The key to this transition is fax technology that runs on modular, open hard-ware instead of the closed, proprietary hardware that defined — and con-strained — yesterday’s fax systems. The transition to open hardware has already taken place in computer telephony, where standards are well established. The result has been tremendous user benefits, including lower costs and wider flexibility to combine features and technologies from different vendors.

Faxing Over IP
Another new wrinkle in creating a "universal everything" system is the powerful role of the Internet and corporate intranets. According to a Frost and Sullivan report, the market for telephony solutions over Internet protocol (IP) net-works will more than double annually over each of the next three years, based on the availability of innovative and cost-saving solutions like toll-free long-distance calling and Web-enabled call centers and help desks. Companies are making major improvements in both the quality and the cost of their inter-office communications using intranets, which can also dramatically lower the cost of fax transmission, since approximately 30 per-cent of fax transmissions are to remote locations in the same company (Source: Pitney Bowes Gallup Study, 1996).

THE INTERNET
Integrating fax with the computing and networking infrastructure to transmit over the Internet creates numerous opportunities to enhance fax delivery and reduce expenses:

• E-mail-to-fax gateways: E-mail messages can be directed to fax machines. Users can address e-mail and fax recipients in one message.
• Internet fax gateways: These route traffic both onto and off of the Internet, serving as the building block for a fax-enabled Internet.
• Universal inbox: Using the Internet for retrieval, all messages (fax, e-mail, or voice) can be delivered any-where in the world.
• WWW/fax-on-demand server: Internet usage is not yet universal. However, fax-on-demand servers with Internet capabilities can retrieve Web pages based on touch-tone selections. Information providers can maintain data on a Web server, distributing it to users who have access to fax machines, but not the Internet.

Advanced Features
Many advanced capabilities of high-end fax machines can be provided to the simplest fax machine via an Internet fax gateway. Some of these features may include: fax usage reporting and management; secure delivery; guaranteed delivery and never-busy receipt; and fax broadcast.

The Platform
The key to managing previously discrete technologies is digital signal processing (DSP), which provides a powerful, generic processing platform. This platform is essential to the transition from silicon-based modems to "universal everything" because technology simply moves too fast. Moreover, each technology — voice, fax, call control, speech recognition — is quickly evolving on its own. It would be much too expensive and time-consuming to try to capture all this evolution in silicon; it must take place in firmware.

STANDARDS
Fax communication has been standardized since the early 1980s. Now the same standards bodies that created the standards for fax communication are creating international standards for fax and voice over IP networks.

Computer telephony (CT) solutions, like fax solutions, began as proprietary systems. Creating and implementing these systems demanded highly specialized knowledge, resulting in high costs for customers and incompatibilities between different manufacturers’ solutions. Over the past few years, the challenges in computer telephony have been greatly simplified by the emergence of open CT standards like PCI, H.100, H.323, MVIP, and the ANSI-standard SCbus. Moreover, the major CT component manufacturers are now supporting open systems standards.

The general advantages of designing systems to open industry standards are overwhelming. Competition — at all levels — leads to lower prices, enhanced features, and continual innovation. Since system integrators need to excel in fewer aspects of system design, costs fall even more. In the world of fax, migrating to standard hardware will mean that investments in the new software-based "universal everything" system will be ensured interoperability across different vendors and be easily upgradable as future standards evolve — unlike the current generation of fax hardware.

THE WIDE-OPEN FUTURE
Fax has become an essential business tool. And tomorrow’s fax systems will deliver new features for a lower cost as new systems are built on open, standard hardware. The move to open standards will let users optimize their voice and fax transmission over a single network, using the Internet and corporate intranets to transmit without the high charges being incurred today.

John Taylor is the general manager of Dialogic’s Fax Division. Dialogic Corporation is a leading manufacturer of high-performance, standards-based computer-telephony integration components. Dialogic products are used in voice, fax, data, voice recognition, speech synthesis, and call center management CTI applications. Headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey, Dialogic has regional headquarters in Tokyo and Brussels and sales offices worldwide. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.dialogic.com.