In its recently published report, “Five Emerging Use Cases to Drive Cloud Fax ROI”(August 2017), Gartner states, “While ad hoc use of fax is generally observed to be diminishing, enterprise use of fax for high-volume, production fax processes has remained steady, or in some cases has increased as enterprises find new use cases for the reliable, auditable and low-cost technology. In fact, Gartner has seen a measurable year-over-year increase in the number of inquiries from enterprise customers currently evaluating and implementing cloud fax solutions in support of their critical business processes.”
However, the most riveting part of the report is that it states:
As the report states, enterprises adopt cloud fax for a number of reasons:
- Total cost of ownership (TCO) — cost savings can be delivered in three areas:
- Hardware investments — the enterprise avoids the telephony costs associated with establishing physical fax lines, and/or IT avoids the capital investments in fax servers and software.
- Maintenance costs — elimination of telephony and IT maintenance costs for ongoing monitoring, support and fault resolution.
- Telephony usage costs — cloud fax minimizes long-distance phone costs by moving the point at which a document enters the phone network closer to the source or destination.
- Scalability — services can be easily scaled up or down as needed, thus eliminating investments in hardware, software, databases, voice over IP (VoIP) gateways and phone lines to meet your peak volume requirements, investments that lay idle for the balance of the time
- High availability — enterprise cloud fax services can offer advanced disaster recovery at redundant data centers and guaranteed service-level availability, often an improvement over on-premises fax solutions that require additional high investments to achieve similar levels of reliability
- Mobility — access fax from anywhere, including desktops, print hardware and mobile devices
- Compliance — regulatory certifications, centralize management features and other features, such as archiving of fax communications via a web portal with tiered access controls, support numerous compliance and regulatory challenges
However, while I completely agree with Gartner’s assessment of why organizations seek a cloud fax solution, each of which can easily be defined as the “low hanging fruit” of implementing a cloud fax solution, what our customers quickly realize is that implementing an enterprise cloud fax solution has much bigger, broader impacts to the business beyond just improving faxing.
- Shortened time to revenue through faster business workflows and process automation
- Increased customer satisfaction by communicating and processing documents more quickly
- Supported corporate initiatives for digital transformation and modernization strategies
- Expanded to new markets and customer segments more quickly to support organic growth
Fax on, global corporations. OpenText is here to help you maximize both the “low hanging fruit” and the positive impacts to your overall business with an enterprise cloud fax solution.
