Applications - Fax figures on networks

The fax machine has wormed its way into our hearts over the years despite its poor quality. However, the standalone fax is under attack from unified messaging and network faxing. Guy Matthews investigates.

The prognosis for the humble standalone fax machine is not good.

spite its poor quality. However, the standalone fax is under attack from unified messaging and network faxing. Guy Matthews investigates. There are some 35 million fax machines still in regular corporate use around the world, but our appetite for them is not merely sated, but in steep decline.

No big surprise there. For years we watched in awe as they churned out blotchy, monotone messages on reams of horrible curly paper at agonisingly slow speed. Then we graduated to gnashing our teeth in rage, as the multiple drawbacks of sending important information by such a flaky medium dawned.

Some residual fondness for the technology, if not the machines, appears to have survived the backlash. For, while the future is supposed to be all about e-mail, workflow, and sophisticated document management, fax has been able to raise its game and become an increasingly important network application, working alongside and in conjunction with other messaging mediums.

That the technology has survived at all seems to be down to some strange emotional hold it has over us, as well some genuine practical advantages.

A survey last year by Gallup, which quizzed medium to large UK companies about their use of fax, revealed that while around 65 per cent of companies had implemented e-mail, a majority of their staff still preferred faxing, believing it to be more reliable.

Since network faxing started to take off around three years ago, it has displaced manual faxing in corporate offices at a steady rate. A recent survey by IDC, commissioned by Hewlett-Packard, showed that nine per cent of global corporates have adopted network faxing, a modest figure, but one that is rising fast.

Chris Oswald, managing director of Equisys, the UK-based vendor of the largely SME-focused Zetafax fax software product, believes that adopters of network faxing fall into two broad categories. "There are those companies who still use fax as their main messaging tool, but want to take the task away from standalones and put it on a PC," he said. "Then there are users that have already moved over to e-mail, but still need to send and receive faxes. After all, however heavily you are into e-mail, you will have suppliers and customers who are not."

Could it be curtains?

What though of the future? Has fax really got the legs to carry on well into the next decade? Talk to network fax vendors and users, and you come away with the inescapable impression that, healthy as the present market is, it is living on borrowed time. There are plenty of people who view network faxing as no more than an intermediary staging post between the death of analog, paper-based, manual faxing and wholly digital, paper-free, multimedia messaging.

Matthew Bekker is sales director of Techland, distributor of the FAXSys product from Optus, and one of the major suppliers of enterprise-wide network fax solutions in the UK. He believes that network faxing may already be yesterday's buzzword: "What corporates want to talk to us about now is unified messaging. Fax is not going away just yet. The future is fax and e-mail unified."

Bekker gave fax, as we know it, another five years.

Perhaps because they are all scrambling to protect their future in the face of rapidly evolving user needs, network fax vendors appear to be able to agree on little. There are dozens of suppliers in the marketplace, each seemingly occupying a niche within a niche, all of which adds up to a confusing proposition for the interested corporate specifier.

Castelle, for instance, is in a virtual niche. While most suppliers are evangelising solutions that sit on a standard NT or Unix server like any other software application, Castelle persists in marketing solutions based round its own dedicated hardware box. Thus far, with customers such as BMW and Standard Life, plus OEM deals with the likes of 3Com, it appears to be sitting pretty.

"People have been warning us that it's a software market for years, but we find users like a complete turnkey solution that does not require a PC, fax cards and a third party to make it all work," said Alan Paton, Castelle's sales director. To hedge its bets, Castelle has recently acquired a software-focused network fax vendor in the shape of ObjectFax.

Other vendors seem only united in their rejection of Castelle's market position. Oswald of Equisys said: "Castelle is trying to get on board the software boat to get a foot in the market, but it may be too late."

The niche that Equifax owns, at least in the UK, is the small- to medium-sized user. Its Zetafax product is less scalable than most, but at least it enjoys a good take-up among its target audience. Unlike many other network fax solutions, Zetafax is delivered to users through a network of third parties, which means that it is often optimised by those parties for particular industry uses.

Oswald is fully resigned to the fact that fax technology will not last forever, and as a leading light in the Group 5 Fax Messaging Forum (see box), anticipates a gradual shift to some sort of universal messaging standard over the next few years. He said: "We may be basically a network fax company at the moment, but the e-mail/fax integration side of our business will grow as a percentage."

Joining forces

He points out that while fax technology has well-documented disadvantages, so does e-mail. Integration of the two, combining the best features of each, is an obvious way forward: "You can't e-mail a brochure, and fax is only black and white with limited resolution. G5 will hopefully solve this and give us the best of both."

Arguably, pre-eminent in the fax and e-mail integration market for larger enterprises in the UK is Techland, a distributor of numerous communications solutions including FACSys from Optus. "We are presently engaged on an education and market building process, talking to corporates about universal messaging in the same way we were explaining to them what network faxing was all about three years ago," said Bekker. He believes that a major driver for integrated messaging is emerging in the form of Microsoft, as it looks to promote sexy applications for Exchange to add to its appeal over Lotus Notes.

Like Equisys, he believes that the role of Microsoft will be to make fax messaging a software issue, driving the marketplace away from proprietary hardware solutions like Castelle. He argued that users want, above all, a solution they can simply embed into e-mail, that will run on the same server, or at least a dedicated workstation. He is also not alone in believing that such an integrated communications server is more likely to be NT than Unix.

"Users will want something that goes with the grain of the rest of their IT strategy, and that means NT," he said.

If he is right, this will make the future of vendors like Cheyenne, recently acquired by Computer Associates, a little tricky to negotiate, with its extensive user-base in the Novell NetWare world.

Other vendors that look to be reasonably solidly positioned include Fenestrae, with its Faxination solution for larger enterprises. As an Exchange-only product, Faxination would seem to be at a disadvantage over multi-platform solutions. But on the positive side, Fenestrae has been making some cunning alliances with a host of messaging vendors, including one with Lucent which gives it a foothold in the voice messaging market.

A vendor with both a major enterprise focus and a span of platform support is Omtool, which is about the only serious network fax solution for the Apple Macintosh and Unix markets.

In addition to the leading vendors mentioned here, there are dozens of smaller start-ups, all attracted by what looks like a major growth market. They cannot all be expected to survive, but while they last, they make the market a difficult place to pick winners and losers.

Messaging alliances

The network fax market is certain to consolidate around fewer players over the next year or two, particularly as vendors from other messaging industries, like voicemail, look to forge alliances that bring different messaging strands together. In the meantime, next time you are waiting in a fax machine queue to watch your transmission chug through to an uncertain future, you can, at least, reflect that better methods, in one shape or another, lie ahead.

CASE STUDY: Millward Brown

Millward Brown is a Warwickshire-based market research company employing 500 people, and traditionally, a heavy user of both fax and e-mail.

Kean Millward is the company's senior IT consultant. He explained why fax has remained important, even with e-mail as an alternative: "The great thing about fax for us has always been that it is device independent.

There are no operating systems or communications protocols to worry about." He said that fax comes into its own when forwarding complicated statistics and detailed documents, since fonts and graphics remain intact. Anything that can be printed can be faxed, he said.

Millward Brown decided a couple of years ago to evaluate the automation of the fax process, by bringing it to the desktop. "We realised that this would reduce the amount of time people spent manually sending faxes, and allow them to concentrate on more important matters," said Millward.

The network fax system that the company opted for paid immediate dividends, but it emerged over time that it had its limitations; for example, not allowing full integration with e-mail. Further evaluation brought the Techland-distributed FACSys product to the company's attention, and following a 60-day trial it was decided to roll it out over the whole company's NT-based network.

A decision was also taken to move company communications over to Microsoft Exchange from MS Mail, on account of the integration between FACSys and Exchange. Millward said that the scalability of FACSys was another important factor in his choice.

The solution currently has 10 lines, four inbound Direct Dial Inward lines handled by Ascom routers, and six outbound. Millward said that fax traffic to and from the company is on a continual upward curve, and may soon necessitate deployment of the system's load balancing feature.

On the subject of the future of fax technology, Millward is keeping an open mind: "Until someone comes up with a completely universal e-mail connection, we'll be using fax."

THE G5 STANDARD: A combining solution

The universal adoption of today's G3 fax standard has been one of the keys to the success of the technology. Thanks to G3, faxing may have its drawbacks - it's only in mono with limited resolution, files cannot be edited on receipt - but it does enjoy wide acceptance.

The Group 5 Fax Messaging Forum is presently at work ratifying G5, the likely successor to G3. If successful, G5 could have important advantages over both internet e-mail and G3 faxing as a secure and flexible messaging standard. For example, G5 will address the issue of legal validity, since at present neither internet e-mail nor G3 faxing provides watertight legal proof of sending or receipt of messages.

Perhaps more importantly, G5 is a superset of protocols that further unites the worlds of e-mail and fax, and will allow messages that run over either medium. The bridging of the divide between fax and e-mail will mean that multimedia images and files can be sent by any medium, using encryption if necessary, and edited on receipt.

G5 will also allow point-to-point transmission and sending via a third party, speeding up fax communications, and it will have considerable security advantages over e-mail. It will also enable so-called internet faxing.

Network fax and e-mail vendors are, at present, far from agreement over whether G5 will spell the end for either or both technologies. Nor is its final approval or subsequent success a foregone conclusion.

While around 50 per cent of messaging vendors are actively contributing to the G5 forum, many others are sitting firmly on the fence.