When adding up communications costs, businesses may be surprised by just how much paper faxing is costing them. In fact, the average Fortune 500 company spends $40 million per year on phone service, 40 percent of which goes to faxing, according to a Gallop/Pitney Bowes survey.

 

And while other forms of communication may get more buzz, fax continues to be a vital business tool and part of an overall unified messaging strategy.

 

“Advancements in communications technology have introduced more and more methods for businesses to communicate and collaborate,” according to a recent white paper from Open Text. “The need to exchange information in real-time has been answered with technologies such as live video, Web conferencing and instant messaging. Likewise, the need for businesses to exchange messages and documents, like e-mail, voice-mail, fax and text-based messaging, has been traditionally brought together in what’s known as unified messaging systems.”

 

And convergence of the two is the direction being taken, as companies look to consolidate the ever growing list of media and contents types – all of which impact business.

 

“Most medium-to-large organizations around the world have made significant investments in enterprise fax servers, integrating them with e-mail, voicemail and business applications that generate critical documents which are required to complete necessary transactions” the white paper continued.

 

In particular, the banking, insurance, healthcare, mortgage and manufacturing industries, as well as any businesses that need signatures, drawings, or other paper-based content. They choose to rely on fax because the documents are “tamper-resistant, delivered securely, legally binding and easy to trace.”

 

Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition and enterprise fax over IP helps companies across the globe, from small organizations to the Fortune 100 reduce costs associated with managing faxes and documents that drive their daily operations.

 

Open Text is a Microsoft (News - Alert) Gold Certified Partner, which company officials said has a history of developing products with “a deep interoperability with Exchange Server and the ability to natively send and receive fax messages from a common interface.” Its flagship integration, the Connector for Exchange, helps to route faxes into and out of the Exchange Server system using Open Text Fax Server, RightFax Edition. 

 

The newest version of the Open Text Fax Server v9.4 FP1 supports Microsoft Exchange Server 2010.