Cloud Fax Solutions. Hidden costs of low price-per-page fax services. By Peter Davidson, Davidson Consulting

Transcription

1 Cloud Fax Solutions Hidden costs of low price-per-page fax services By Peter Davidson, Davidson Consulting Biscom, Inc. 321 Billerica Rd. Chelmsford, MA

2 How important are the faxes your company or organization sends and receives? Are you faxing out medical information that may have life-and-death consequences, such as organ transplant documentation that must be in place for authorization? Does it ever arise that your CEO is trying to close a major transaction and it all depends on whether a fax was successfully received? Do you have databases or applications that fax out thousands of individual invoices and it is critical that they are received? Are you a nationwide chain of restaurants or suppliers that can t afford to lose orders or have them delayed, which is just about as bad? It is typical for faxes to be mission-critical documents, sometimes having millions of dollars in the balance. Which raises the question, Why do some businesses choose fax services whose only advantage is an advertised low per-page rate? We hear it time and time again. A purchasing agent finds some fax service provider that will charge him a low ball price and goes with them, thinking he has pulled off a coup. But he doesn t realize what sacrifices these low-cost providers have to make to offer such low-cost service. And he doesn t realize you pay for what you get. Low-cost fax service providers cut corners to drive down prices by: Operating on inexpensive, no-name hardware and often homespun software, so anything can happen Using low-cost facilities with questionable electronic and physical security. If you knew about it, you d worry about thousands of your faxes and where they might end up Using below carrier-grade VoIP telephony connectivity, so some of your faxes may arrive with hard-to-read text Using VoIP facilities that utilize SIP-trunking, which can introduce minor inconsistencies that can hang up faxes... Overbooking their capacity so your bulk faxes may be delayed, which eventually can cause you to lose customers Offering only -to-fax connections over SMTP or semi-secure TLS, which means you are at risk of having your faxes go out over the Internet, unprotected, most likely getting 2

3 stuck at one of the many nodes that s pass through on the Internet which then puts you at risk to be hacked. Offering phone support from agents in overseas locations with limited training and often results in a difficulty in communication of the issue and the agent may not be able to solve your problem... Now, how much per page are you really paying to send a fax? It s like a single traffic incident having a significant impact on thousands of travelers who are on the same highway, with results sometimes spilling over into the access roads and towns and cities. Similarly, a problem in a fax network may be a minor issue for a company with a low fax volume where it can easily be detected and triaged or can alternately find a way to reroute a document and deal with the problem on a case-by-case basis. For a larger company, however, with significant fax traffic containing information that is vital to their business, one incident can throw off their whole operation. As an example, say a business loses $100 for a single fax that that does not get through, e.g. for a late fee on a transaction or a missed order. That loss may not be catastrophic for a small company with light fax volume, but for an enterprise that sends 10,000 faxes that get tied up in the network, that s a loss of a million dollars! A fax service that uses low grade equipment, locations, and oversells its capacity backlogging faxes until lines are free will be less expensive to operate than a service that is built as a carrier-based solution with high-availability. That lower-cost fax service, however, will likely have higher latency and lower reliability, buckling fax traffic like a fender bender on a major artery during rush hour. Biscom s prices may not be the lowest per page that your purchasing agent may find because Biscom provides reliable fax service with enterprise-wide integration, broad-ranging functionality, rock-solid accountability, strong certified security, and enterprise-tested support that is so good that the support team often finds customer problems before your business realizes anything is wrong. Biscom offers cost-effective pricing, with no hidden costs, like minimum traffic levels which can result in you paying a bunch of money for faxes your workers never sent! There are no contracts, you only pay for faxes you actually send. And you get great quality. 3

4 Biscom FAXCOMAnywhere Cloud Fax Biscom, a company that has served Fortune 500 companies for more than a quarter century with its enterprise-wide-ready FAXCOM fax servers, offers fax in the cloud, with FAXCOMAnywhere Cloud Fax. You don t need phone lines, computers, or software, and can take advantage of all the capabilities the company has worked tirelessly to develop in its fax implementations. For the past eight years, Biscom has offered cloud fax services that are identical to its enterprisewide fax server functionality so businesses can outsource their fax workloads and can trust that Biscom will: Send all your faxes and have them delivered they won t get lost, cut off mid-image, or take forever to get to their destination. (During a Biscom support review, there were only six incidents while transmitting ten million faxes. That s a % success rate!) Provide end-to-end security between your users and the cloud provider facilities, so you know your faxes are safe. Biscom data centers meet ISO/IEC 2700 certification for security so, you can be sure that the company offers every conceivable level of security. Plus, Biscom validates its internal operations and processes via annual SSAE 16 Type 2 audits. Never overbook its capacity, because Biscom collocates its assets in Tier 4 data centers (not just Tier 1) with physical security around the equipment, data security and data, and powersupply backup collocated with geographically-dispersed major carriers, including Verizon, AT&T and Level 3 so it is a fail-safe system with complete disaster recovery and an unlimited supply of circuits. Have experienced US-based service engineers who are there for you if you ever have a problem; with network operations and software engineers available if your problem needs to be escalated. Biscom s FAXCOMAnywhere has scalable services for every size of business, you don t need to be a large corporation to take advantage of their cloud fax. The Office Edition can take care of small business/workgroups, or those with basic -to-fax requirements, while the Enterprise Edition supports an entire organization, with all its divisions and all its various computer systems and many specialized applications. With the Enterprise Edition, fax is available anywhere, anytime to any users and any IT resource, including the largest of production fax needs. 4

5 Office Cloud Fax Office Edition supports all client users and also offers a fully-featured Web client for browser-based faxing. Accessible from all popular browsers Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox the Office Edition Web client is an easy-to-use, form-based, dedicated fax client that enables users to do all meaningful tasks including: Send and receive faxes Create private phonebooks Save fax drafts for future transmission Resubmit failed faxes Office Edition also supports mobile faxing, which means that Apple ipad/iphone or any Google Android user can sign and date sales orders, contracts, expense approvals and authorizations using a finger or a stylus. Once workers have signed a fax, they can send it back to the office or to a second recipient, preserving the legal status of a faxed document. Since faxes are actually signed, no stored pre-written signatures are needed, your mobile workers can do their business on-the-fly from wherever they are, saving both time and money and guaranteeing that you can get the business your salespeople win right away. For Fax-To- applications, Office Edition connects directly via SMTP over TLS to the Biscom cloud fax service. The Office Edition is specifically designed for quick and easy setup. The individual designated to handle fax service account management requires no specialized IT background or knowledge. One individual can: Manage users Add/modify/suspend/activate users and assign users to groups View billing activity - View all fax charges on a single monthly bill that can be sorted by sending user, receiving fax number, date/time, etc. Create custom cover pages Biscom s Cover Page Editor program enables you to create personal and departmental cover pages. Fax senders can switch between cover pages as appropriate. A non-technical worker can manage users with simple Web-based account administration, no expensive IT personnel required. If you have workflow applications, Biscom s SOAP-based Web Services API adds fax into any 5

6 workflow application, which means that the money-saving aspects of workflow are available through Biscom Office Edition Cloud Fax. No hidden costs will ever accrue from not having enough lines available, causing your fax broadcasts not to complete in a timely fashion. That s because Biscom, again, uses phone lines from first-tier vendors including Verizon, AT&T, and Level 3. You can port your existing fax numbers to the cloud so there is no need to reprint business cards with a new fax number. All this functionality is backed up by strong US-based, technically trained, support staff, with escalation to engineering when required. No hidden costs in support: they ve been doing it for nearly 30 years with the largest corporations in the world, now they can support your smallest workgroups too. If you move to Office Edition from a fax machine dependent office, you may save up to 40% of your fax costs on paper, toner, extra phone lines, equipment servicing, and manual labor alone the time it takes people to go to a fax machine and use it. Businesses report that Office Edition is cost-justified merely by replacing phone lines to each fax machine with direct-inwarddial (DID) numbers that cost a fraction of telephone lines. Biscom Enterprise Cloud Fax Biscom Enterprise Edition gives you everything Office Edition offers, plus a secure enterprise solution that connects with preexisting systems and resources in your organization all without the need to write any code. Biscom recommends Enterprise Edition if you need to do any of the following: Integrate securely with internal corporate resources. Use Active Directory to provision and administrate Biscom Cloud Fax. Connect securely to internal databases or mainframes. Use print outputs to support production fax applications. Connect to FTP sites, or integrate with SharePoint libraries. Support an unlimited number of users (no hidden costs per user) 6

7 No code development is ever required by the customer, but APIs are available if you have custom applications. What distinguishes the Enterprise Edition from the Office Edition is a piece of software that comes with Enterprise to provide all the integration and isolate your network from the cloud fax service by limiting the exchange of information to only faxes and call connection details. Mission-critical corporate data is always as safe as you ve ever kept it. The software creates one or more fax queues on one or more virtual machine or servers according to how customers choose to organize their network. The software integration hooks can be turned on or off, depending on what is needed. Most of the configuration and integration is done through Microsoft Management Console and Active Directory. By doing it through Active Directory, administrators can use group policies to provision and manage users, just as they manage all other network resources. Biscom s software approach is superior to poking a hole in your firewall to expose Active Directory to the outside world or to uploading all the employee records to a cloud provider, an approach used by low-cost cloud fax providers. Biscom s queue never exposes any of your mission-critical data to the cloud because only faxes and some fax metadata (TSI, phone #, etc.) go back and forth through the secure connection to the Biscom Cloud. Enterprise Edition stores all of your faxes within your enterprise, so your employee IT records never leave your databases, and only fax data goes to the cloud where it is encrypted while it is at rest. Data used to create faxes can't be stolen as it is automatically deleted and overwritten in two passes. Biscom can connect your Oracle or SAP resources to fax capabilities for the same per-page pricing. With database print streams comes production fax applications meaning that organizations can fax invoices, purchase orders, or any other transactional documents to customers in enormous numbers (some Biscom customers send out hundreds of thousands of such documents daily) for pennies a page, rather than the cost of paper, printing, envelopes, and postage. Faxing these documents delivers them in seconds rather than days, speeding up the time when you receive payments. Production fax systems can be operated in a hands-free environment: simply set the application up once, walk away, and your production fax applications will operate automatically from then on. Production faxing saves tremendous amounts of time and money. Biscom Cloud Enterprise Fax integrates with: IBM mainframes and midrange systems Microsoft SharePoint 7

8 Oracle databases SAP and other ERP systems CRM installations IBM FileNet Hyland Onbase content management systems Health systems like Epic, GE Centricity, McKesson Technology Solutions, and Siemens/ Cerner Healthcare Active Directory and LDAP-based systems In house systems enabled to connect with secure web services With the rules-based Advanced Fax Routing utility, organizations can automate the process of automatically reading data off of received faxes and directly into databases (with bar codes or optical character recognition). When faxes are automatically delivered to the correct recipients, no administrator has to manually direct the faxes, which saves money (and the management of DID numbers). Of course, like Office Edition, Biscom Enterprise Cloud Fax supports mobile fax users and provides all the productivity-enhancing and cost-saving benefits described above. Administrators are equipped with many tools to control and manage fax usage throughout the enterprise. FAXCOM Dashboard is a visual display tool for monitoring and queues and their connections to the cloud service, then issuing alarms when certain pre-specified conditions are met. Dashboard is a highly flexible tool, enabling you to view the activity of hundreds of services at once, as well as zero in on a specific aspect of a specific service. All this is backed up by enterprise level support, that is US-based and run by experienced support staff and engineers. Biscom support has been acclaimed for years for how well it has supported the very largest enterprises in the world. Biscom Cloud Fax Is a Smart Value Let me ask these questions again: Is your organization s faxing important? Have you lost customers in the past because faxes weren t delivered properly? Do you send faxes that represent thousands or millions of dollars, where the consistent timeliness and quality of faxes impacts everyday production, or where quality of patient care is at stake? 8

9 Then because you want your business to operate flawlessly, go with a company that offers you rock-solid faxing. Do not get confounded by a cent-per-page coup your purchasing agent thinks he/she may pull off, which you may regret when an important fax is not delivered on time. Biscom Cloud Fax is the economical choice among fax services when you account for the value of your faxes, the cost of the service, and the quality delivered. ABOUT BISCOM Founded in 1986, Biscom pioneered the fax server and hosted on demand cloud fax marketplaces. Biscom has provided many of the world s largest companies with secure communications solutions, most notably its award winning enterprise FAXCOM Server and FAXCOM Anywhere hosted cloud enterprise fax solutions, Hybrid Fax Platform, Biscom Digital Fax, File Conversion software, and Biscom Secure File Transfer and Collaboration products. ABOUT DAVIDSON CONSULTING Peter J. Davidson is president of Davidson Consulting, a firm that specializes in market research, consulting, newsletter and industry conferences covering facsimile. Davidson has covered the fax industry intensively since 1986, when he became the writer of FAXreporter, a monthly newsletter published by Buyers Laboratory, a Consumer Union spin off that tests and reports on office systems. In 1994, Davidson authored a report, also published by Buyers Laboratory, entitled Hidden Fax Costs and Secrets to Savings, which was a best-seller among fax machine dealers and corporate buyers. Copyright Biscom All rights reserved. 9