Yes, Fax is still very prevalent in today's modern office.

One thing that I’m very proud of about how we conduct business here at Versature is that we are insanely focused on quality. There have been numerous occasions where competitive pressures or customer requests have made us question how we were doing things, but I’m glad that the long term reliability and supportability of our solutions was always put first. We’d rather turn away business than do a poor job of it.

For example, we still don’t have a reliable cordless phone option that we are 100% comfortable with, so we don’t offer it.  We offer cordless headsets which tie into IP phones instead. Sure, we’d have more luck in retail businesses if we had a cordless phone, and there are many inexpensive options out there .. but the quality and reliability of these solutions is not where we need them to be for a business-class offering, so we made a conscious decision not to sell them.

The reason I mention this is because for the longest time, we didn’t offer a full fax replacement solution.  We offered an “Incoming Fax to Email” solution because we knew it was rock solid, but when customers asked us what they should do about outgoing faxes, we suggested that they keep the status quo.  This is because fax is based on analog technology, and the analog-to-digital conversion that needed to happen for a fax to transmit over IP was problematic.  Over the years we’ve been recommending businesses that require outbound faxing to keep one analog line for that purpose.  Not ideal, but we knew it would be rock solid and that’s what our customers expect from Versature.

Of course, as technology evolves we are always evaluating new solutions, and about 6 months ago we started investigating a new fax technology that transmitted outgoing fax images over HTTPS (the protocol of the web) instead of using analog-to-digital conversion.  We tested the solution in our lab and were pleasantly surprised with the results.  We put the solution into production for ourselves, and then rolled it out to a few customers on a trial.  Everything having worked as expected, we recently announced that in addition to the “Incoming Fax to Email” service that we currently have, we now have a new solution which we are calling “Fax over IP”, which allows for 2 way fax communication using your standard fax machine.  With our Fax Over IP service, you can decide to receive your faxes on your fax machine or you can elect to receive them via email.

The tech behind the scenes of this solution is pretty interesting.  We provide you with an adapter that you plug into your network and your fax machine.  The fax machine sends and receives it’s data in the normal way .. it’s oblivious to the changes that the adapter puts in place.  The adapter receives faxes over HTTPS from our servers and then sends them to the fax machine in the normal way (or sends via email if that is what you have elected to do).  When the fax machine sends an outgoing fax, the adapter receives the fax, digitizes the image and transmits it over HTTPS in a batch to our servers for transmission to the final destination.  For the end user, there are no differences to how they use their traditional fax machine .. it just works, and that makes us happy.

If you are still paying for an analog telephone line just for outgoing faxes, you can now eliminate that line with Versature’s new Fax Over IP service.  If you’d like more information, please contact Versature Sales at 1-877-498-3772 and press Option 2, or speak with your provisioning engineer who can get you hooked up!