Technology has changed our society for the good in many ways, and it continues to do so at a fast pace. As new high-tech solutions for age-old business problems are created, older solutions are less frequently used. You may think fax machines may be one of those “older solutions” on its way to being phased out. Fax solutions aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, however. According to The National contributor Valentin Bontemps, several million fax machines are still sold every year, and sales in Japan reached 1.2 million machines in 2014. Offices worldwide are seeing the advantages of fax and are still using them for important functions. For instance, a faxed signature is considered an original.
“The market is holding up. Those who predicted the death of the fax 10 years ago were wrong,” Nicolas Cintre, deputy director in France for the Japanese company Brother, told The National.
Fax is here to stay
Fax solutions continue to be useful in times of need as well, such as during the recent Sony data breach. According to Business Insider, when hackers accessed data from Sony’s servers, they forced the company to start using fax machines again and paying employees with paper checks due to the increased security provided by these types of transactions.
“Faxing serves as an inexpensive and backup emergency communications system,” Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor at Texas A&M University, told The National.
But as faxing continues to be an important staple in many offices, it too experiences change. What does the fax machine of the future look like?
The cloud can connect much of your tech equipment – including your fax machine.Where have we been?
In the 1990s, according to NBC News, people thought the future of fax would lead to the open road: fax machines in cars. A few large vehicle manufacturers even designed cars that could fax – including Isuzu, which announced it was planning to build the Isuzu 4200R in 1989, according to Jalopnik contributor Patrick George. Even though the fax machine by far enjoys the most popularity in Isuzu’s native Japan, the car was never actually produced.
“Sustainability goals are suddenly easier to achieve.”
How far have we come?
Now, the vision of putting fax in a moving vehicle isn’t so far off. Truck drivers in the shipping industry use fax machines in their cabs in order to exchange extensive documentation with customers, and these kinds of communications are made simpler by cloud-based fax solutions and fax-over-Internet-protocol systems. The true future of the fax is here, and the shipping industry in particular is taking advantage of it.
The way that we’re faxing is different now, too. With more companies making the move to the cloud, it only makes sense that other business functions would also make that crucial switch. Now, cloud-based fax solutions can help businesses in the health care, shipping and education fields stay connected to one another through the use of FoIP solutions. With fax over IP, sustainability goals are suddenly easier to achieve – because being able to fax a document directly to someone’s email address promotes the paperless office.
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