Recently at the ITEXPO West 2010 in Los Angeles, TMC’s (News - Alert) Erin Harrison had the chance to interview Max Schroeder (News - Alert), senior vice president of Faxcore.

The “real news” in FoIP, fax over IP, is in related technologies, Schroeder said. “Our product was certified for Xchange 2010 Fax.” The real exciting thing about FoIP is not necessarily sending a fax, but having everything part of a converged network. You have voice, you have fax, e-mail, everything combined, and that is the real value of FoIP.”

Schroeder said he’s seen a lot of progress in the industry in terms of adoption of FoIP, noting that he’s part of the SIP Forum (News - Alert), on the FoIP task group. “We’re also working with a group called the i3 Forum,” he said, “which is made up of the largest carriers in the world covering 80 companies and over a billion phone numbers.”

Harrison said that people today are still asking why fax is relevant in 2010. Schroeder remarked that most people who ask that question “assume that e-mail is going to replace fax.”

“The first time I was asked that question was in Melbourne in 1990,” he said, explaining that “e-mail is text and fax is an image.” Plus he noted that fax has been around a long time, making the eyebrow-raising claim that “the first commercial fax was in the mid-1800s.” Which might be a bit like claiming Blaise Pascal invented the computer in the mid-1600s, but Schroeder’s point is taken: Fax has been around for a long time, it’s not going away tomorrow.

Plus, as Schroeder reminded Harrison, fax “is a legal document in systems all around the world. E-mail is not.”