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With exciting technologies such as tablet computers, mobile video conferencing and augmented reality, people who laugh at fax innovation might be forgiven.

“A lot of people laugh when we talk about fax or even smirk or smile, and probably I was the first one to do that in 2007 when Sagemcom hired me onboard and told me I would be leading a fax server business,” Jean Champagne (News - Alert) told TMCnet during an interview at ITEXPO Miami this past January, general manager for the fax unit at French technology giant, Sagemcom (News - Alert).

“People associate it with an antiquated technology,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it is sexy-cool like my R&D leader says when he gives a session at different trade shows, but the important thing about it is that it is at the core of mission-critical business processes at large corporations.”

Because it is still an essential element of business processes at many companies, fax technology has quietly continued to advance even while more appealing offerings have taken the spotlight.

Champagne told us that its business fax unit enjoys an almost 25 percent compound annual growth year over year, which is pretty impressive for a technology that many people laugh at. Many tech firms would love that kind of growth.

“People have that embedded in their business processes deeply, and giving them disaster recovery, business continuity, high availability, scalability—those are all things they are looking for,” he said. “So, there is still a lot of umph left in fax.”

The latest iteration of the fax is fax-over-IP, also known as FoIP. Just as voice is moving onto an IP-based infrastructure, so too is fax.

Mirroring its voice-over-IP (VoIP) brethren, fax machines also are moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud.

Sagemcom’s latest offering, announced at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Miami, is its XMediusFAX Cloud service. It comes with all the features of Sagemcom’s on-premise fax solution, but works as a web service so it doesn’t require hardware purchase or maintenance.

“We’ve got two data center sites, one in Atlanta, one in Portland. We offer full disaster recovery and business continuity services,” said Champagne. “That was paramount. And you’re getting XMedius’ fax with all its features, all its functionality. You’re not getting a thinned-down or a dumbed-down version of XMedius’ fax software.”

These include advanced inbound fax features such as OCR and bar code routing features, and receiving inbound faxes to e-mail, desktop client or Web client; application integration such as Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint and Active Directory; fax management features such as fax number forwarding and toll-free numbers; and fax auditing such as real time fax reports, audit trails of all fax activity, and fax tracking.

“It fits in their UC [unified communications] strategies very well,” said Champagne.

You can find the full interview with Jean Champagne here.