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Warning: This story is about facsimile solutions.

Agreed, this topic ain’t sexy. Fax is relatively flat in terms of the number of faxes sent, and the number of fax machines is clearly declining, being replaced by multifunctional peripheral devices. Nonetheless, fax servers and services represent a multibillion dollar opportunity. And fax remains an important method of document sharing.

This friendly reminder comes from Sagemcom, a 4,600-person strong operation with U.S. revenues on the order of $2 billion and a documents division that’s worth 180 million euros. (The company also has business units that address energy and telecom, providing metering systems; and broadband, with ADSL and VDSL gateways and set-top boxes.)

Sagemcom’s Jean Champagne (News - Alert), general manager, and John Nikolopoulos, director of marketing, met with TMCnet last week at Cisco Live in San Diego. They talked about the company’s coming cloud-based fax solution and the dynamism that remains in the fax space.

The Sagemcom business unit with which these gentlemen are affiliated first introduced T.38 software for fax over IP back in 2002. Sagemcom owns both the T.38 stack and the fax application software behind it. Meanwhile, others rely on solutions from Dialogic (News - Alert), which may complicate things for FoIP partners, according to Nikolopoulos.

Sagemcom’s solution is called XMediusFAX. In the third quarter, the company plans to launch a cloud-based service based on the technology. That service will be available first in the U.S. and Canada, and starting next year in Europe.

Release 7 of XMediusFAX makes its debut on June 28. With this iteration, Sagemcom is integrating SIP trunking directly into the software. That’s important given the widespread adoption of SIP trunking in the last few years. The SIP trunking capability will be offered by Sagemcom as an option.

Sagemcom also has partnered with BabyTel, a T.38 fax service provider, and integrated that company’s technology directly into its software. Sagemcom plans to do similar partnerships with other service providers.

All of the above, and the fact that Sagemcom has more than 30 R&D employees in Montreal working on fax over IP, demonstrate the company’s ongoing commitment to and investment in fax solutions, said Champagne. There is no doubt there’s a need for secure communications for critical and confidential information by companies in key verticals like finance and healthcare, to name just two, he said.