November 1999

BY MARTY SCHULTZ

According to an IDC study, sending faxes accounts for 39 percent of an average company’s phone bill. The typical Fortune 500 company sends 945,000 pages of fax each year. Last year, worldwide, over $92 billion was spent on faxing.

While almost every company has an IT department to track and monitor network devices, and a telecommunications department to track and minimize phone costs, very few companies have any idea how much they are spending on fax. Solutions are available to help meet some of the business requirements (lower costs, a method of tracking fax usage, etc.), but no solution has been able to meet every business need, while also providing fax for free — until the advent of the IP-enabled network fax infrastructure.

Getting control of the fax infrastructure offers hard-dollar savings. Unlike most IT solutions that profess to increase productivity and result in “soft-dollar” savings, using the Internet to fax for free results in dramatically reduced telephony expenses. Once the infrastructure is in place to start sending faxes via the Internet, instead of the PSTN, savings continue month after month.

THE EVOLUTION OF FAX
With the constant evolution of communications technology, fax is increasingly changing to offer a faster, cheaper, more efficient method of transferring data. Each generation of faxing has delivered added benefits while defining the requirements for the next generation — leading to the development of IP fax.

Generation 1: Fax Machine To Fax Machine
Since the introduction of the fax machine, it quickly became pervasive due to its ease of use. Companies only need to plug a fax machine into the PSTN, and they’re ready to start sending and receiving faxes. Since the PSTN is available worldwide, fax machines became the standard way to send paper documents. The problem with this approach is that documents that originated on a computer could not be easily faxed. Users had to go through a time-consuming manual process of creating the document, printing it out, and then walking to the fax machine to manually dial and feed the document through.

Generation 2: Fax Server To Fax Machine
The explosive growth of the Internet and e-mail has set the expectation that individuals should be able to communicate reliably with the rest of the world right from their desktop computers. Sending and receiving documents should be easy, free, and reliable.

But despite the growth of e-mail, companies are still relying heavily on fax machines to transfer information. A stand-alone fax machine at every desktop is not cost effective. And with 20 employees sharing one fax machine at most companies, employee productivity is reduced. Fax servers solved part of this problem with Windows NT in the mid-1990s. With a fax server software application, users could send a fax as easily as they could send an e-mail, from any desktop client.

Popular fax server software solutions collect documents from interfaces such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, SMTP Mail, cc:Mail Browser, or fax client for Internet Explorer or Netscape, and then transmit the fax over the PSTN. The fax server also receives faxes sent from a traditional fax machine, and delivers them to the user’s desktop in an electronic format, without ever generating paper.

Once a company deploys a fax server, two groups of systems are in use: Traditional fax machines, and PCs with fax servers. The fax servers process all documents that are stored on the computer system, and the fax machines send all paper documents. As a result, corporations minimize telephone charges for sending faxes, increase the capacity of the fax infrastructure to send and receive more faxes, enhance the reliability of the fax infrastructure, and reduce costs associated with fax machines, additional phone lines, wasted paper, and employee productivity.

Generation 2.5: Fax Server To Fax Service Provider To Fax Machine
In the late 1990s, using a fax service provider became an extension to fax servers as a way to handle computer-based faxing. Instead of placing fax modems in the fax server, the fax server routes the fax traffic to a fax service provider (FSP) over the Internet. The FSP then transmits the faxes to their destinations. Many FSPs provide hundreds or thousands of fax modem lines connected to the PSTN.

This configuration enables the FSP to collect the faxes and deliver them at a lower cost than traditional telephone rates. While the fax still moves across the PSTN prior to being delivered on the fax machine, the long-distance charges are reduced. The FSP moves the fax across the Internet until it gets very close to the recipient’s location, and then dials on the PSTN for the “last mile,” to deliver the fax to the recipient fax machine.

The advantage of using an FSP is that a company avoids having to provision for the telephony needs of faxing. While they still need a fax server to collect documents from a wide variety of gateways (e-mail, fax clients, back office applications, etc.), and to render and manage the documents, only an Internet connection is required to route the faxes to the FSP. However, most FSPs process documents that already started on the computer, and pay little attention to documents that are faxed using traditional fax machines.

Generation 3: Fax Over Internet
Today, the convergence of the Internet and e-mail with fax machines is making corporate faxing free. This new technology allows companies to transfer data even faster and more cost-effectively than desktop faxing products by merging the economies of Internet-based communications with the convenience and universal acceptance of fax-based systems. Whereas traditional fax sends a transmission entirely over the PSTN, an Internet-enabled network fax infrastructure can make it possible to send a fax end-to-end from sender to recipient over the IP network. It eliminates the “phone call” required by today’s fax transmission and, therefore, the associated cost.

Companies do not need to invest in an IP fax machine to complete their IP fax network — they can connect a fax machine to the Internet using satellite hardware devices. Based on the T.37 standard created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF,) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an IP fax satellite collects faxes from a fax machine, and sends the fax to the recipient’s fax machine via the Internet. Similarly, an IP fax satellite collects faxes via the Internet, and prints them on a fax machine connected to the network. By connecting each fax machine to an IP fax satellite, all of the company’s fax machines become Internet-enabled. Hence, when a fax is sent from one office to another, the fax actually travels across the Internet (for free), instead of across the PSTN.

Another important benefit of IP faxing is there’s no change in user behavior required. An individual just walks up to the fax machine and sends the document like a traditional fax. The fax is then collected at the IP fax satellite and forwarded to the fax server via the T.37 protocol (along with the recipient’s phone number). The IP fax server determines if the phone number corresponds to an Internet-enabled fax machine. If it does, it forwards the fax to the recipient via the Internet, using T.37. Otherwise, it sends the fax as a traditional PSTN call.

Over the next few years, many fax machine vendors will be releasing IP-enabled fax machines. Several companies already have. When these products are in wide distribution, users will be able to send an Internet fax to either a traditional fax machine using an IP fax satellite, or to an Internet-enabled fax machine. Until IP-enabled fax machines are common, most companies are using IP fax satellites to Internet-enable their existing fax machines.

Since up to 40 percent of a company’s faxes are sent intra-company (from one office location to another), and many companies already connect their offices to the Internet, IP fax can enable these companies to send fax for free immediately. When sending to fax machines outside of the company (inter-company), IP fax can also enable free faxing. Instead of faxing directly to another fax machine, IP fax redirects faxes into e-mail.

The user can fill out a table of commonly used fax numbers and e-mail addresses for which they’d like to redirect faxes to e-mail. Any time a fax is sent from either an Internet-enabled fax machine or from any desktop to the designated phone number, it will be automatically re-routed to the specified e-mail address. When the e-mail arrives at this address, the recipient can just double-click on the attachment, and view the TIFF image of the fax. From there, he can print it out, or forward it to someone to be processed.

DEPLOYING IP FAX
Once a company decides to adopt an IP fax infrastructure, the implementation is quite simple. The first step involves deploying a fax server. This consists of the Windows NT system running the fax server software, and many client interfaces such as Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. A fax modem or fax board, such as those made by Brooktrout, Dialogic (now Intel,), or Natural MicroSystems connects the software to the PSTN.

Next, the IP fax software is enabled and one or more fax machines must be Internet-enabled using the IP fax satellite. The IP fax server maintains the information about each fax machine connected to it via an IP fax satellite. It also maintains the fax-to-e-mail table used to designate faxes outside of the corporate network. At this point, one office is now IP fax-enabled. Faxes that originate at either the fax machine or a PC client can now be sent via T.37, e-mail, or traditional PSTN fax.

To enable additional offices, the IP fax software is loaded on servers in other locations, and IP fax satellites are installed on fax machines at the other locations. The next step is to connect all IP fax servers throughout the organization. Together, all of the servers form an IP fax domain, and information is automatically replicated among all of the servers.

WELL-BEHAVED FAX MACHINES
An additional benefit of converging an organization’s entire fax infrastructure onto a single IP platform is central management of all faxes. With traditional faxing — which accounts for up to half of long-distance telephone costs, and uses up almost as much paper as printers — administrators have little control of what is sent or received. Nothing is archived, and there is no accountability.

With the new IP fax infrastructure, telecommunications managers can now effectively archive, store, view, monitor, and digitally manage 100 percent of their organization’s inbound and outbound faxes (whether they start from fax machines or desktop faxing), which allows them to identify fax trends and manage costs more effectively.

With fax server software and fax service providers, fax costs can be significantly reduced by routing faxes over a company’s existing data network, as opposed to the PSTN. With the development of IP fax solutions, companies can now reap the features and benefits of fax server and e-mail: The popularity and pervasiveness of fax, ability to fax from the desktop, and most important, the ability to reduce the cost of faxing to zero. c

Marty Schultz is the chief technology officer of Omtool, Ltd., a leading supplier of network fax server solutions. He founded the company in 1991, and was one of the principal developers of Fax Sr., Omtool’s award-winning enterprise fax server software solution. For more information, visit Omtool’s Web site at www.omtool.com.