Headquartered within the Boston area of Massachusetts and opening its doors around 26 years ago, Biscom is touted as powering two primary businesses. The first is fax, which was originally pioneered as a way to position the company within the computer server industry as well as its hosted cloud fax business or fax services on-demand. Biscom also has a hybrid fax platform that is exclusive and unique in the industry due to the fact that it seamlessly combines on-premise fax servers with a hosted cloud solution and is completely seamless between fax servers and hosted cloud platforms. The business is also known for its secure file transfer offering, which is ideal for hospitals that must adhere to strict regulations in order to protect patient information.

 Targeting very large enterprises with its key segments being healthcare, accounting for over a third of its business in addition to financial services, government and manufacturing and transportation industries, the enterprise fax provider caters to some of the largest companies in the U.S. and Canada measuring up to faxing demands from the IRS, US Senate and FBI. 

In fact, one of its largest customers Massachusetts General Hospital was recently recognized as the top hospital in the nation, which clearly shows implementing fax remains extremely valuable.

I recently had the chance to speak with the Biscom’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Alan Gonsenhauser about why he thinks enterprise fax is here for the long term.

He stated, “In line with recent survey results that show that fax is the predominant form of communication for 63 percent of healthcare providers, the truth is fax is being utilized by all healthcare providers, hospitals, physician practices and health plans who leverage fax to move documents around for a number of reasons such as it’s the extension of paper, it’s ubiquitous, it’s installed and it’s an easy and convenient bridge between organizations that are automated to different degrees. In essence, enterprise fax serves as the bridge between paper and electronics.”

One obstacle enterprise fax has been forced to overcome however, is a public relations-related problem of sorts that is derived from most people thinking of fax and then instantly picturing a fax machine. Although currently there are approximately 50 million fax machines out there,  fax today is mostly all software, integration and  fax over IP (FoIP) versus over old dedicated telecom PSTN lines. It’s virtualized so organizations can get rid of servers once and for all, it’s tied into legacy production systems and it’s rules-based.

Any company that is interested in lowering costs and driving huge operational efficiencies via enterprise fax should first complete a survey on how many hardware servers they have but start with where their fax machines are, and if they have dedicated lines especially in healthcare where you need an audit trail of transactions but you don’t want people to see sensitive documents with protected health information.

In situations like this, “It makes complete sense to at least go to a fax server—if not a hosted cloud or hybrid system—to ensure documents are protected, people don’t see them and there is an audit trail present that proves documents have been securely sent,” Gonsenhauser added.

Some increasingly popular trends in the enterprise fax space that are happening right now in the healthcare vertical include the use of laptops, smartphones and iPads and what many people probably don’t realize is you can receive and send important documents via these devices too. Over time, he forecasts that there will be a convergence where fax doesn’t necessarily have to always be at the server, it can instead be on a mobile device. Another trend is the transition to FoIP, as well as virtualization.

He commented, “Fax machines and fax hardware servers are already being completely replaced by software and virtualized. Fax is also beginning to be tied directly into production systems. Looking at the healthcare area specifically, employees will be taking information on faxes either by OCR or barcodes and ingesting this vital data directly into health IT systems so you can convert paper into something electronic and do things within content management systems so data is searchable and can be used with ease.”

Gonsenhauser concluded, “Fax is very different than it used to be.  I was in the fax business 25 years ago when we were primarily selling fax machines and now it’s all software. I think that’s an important story that needs to be told.”

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