cloud

Mike Charalambous is the CEO of SRFax, a Canadian-based Internet fax service provider that provides services in the U.S. and Canada. FaxCompare Kate Harrington sat down with him to talk about the fax industry and the future of Internet faxing.

FaxCompare: Roughly how many new subscribers do you see each month?

SRFax: On average we see about 1,000 new subscribers each month. We’re not a huge company – if you look at a company
like one of j2’s [Global, owner of eFax and MetroFax], they probably get 50,000 new subscribers a month. I think the faxing industry is improving, and we’ve seen great growth. Consultants are, for the first time, saying that demand for online faxing service is now surpassing in-house fax service.

And that’s amazing, because the enterprise market is the biggest fax user, and most of them have in-house servers because they have seen that as more secure and cost effective. But the forecast for the next three to five years is that the online fax market will surpass the server-based market in revenue. That’s exciting for us.

FAF: Have you seen certain industries embracing Internet faxing?

SRFax: I think the biggest growth market has been the medical industry. We’ve got a few electronic medical records companies that have integrated their software with our software. On the whole, healthcare, finance, and legal are heavy users of online faxing.

FAF: What feature requests do you most often hear from customers?

SRFax: I think portability – being able to bring your number with you when you switch providers – is the biggest one, which we do supply. And then there’s a demand for an app. With smartphones today you can do just about anything, and faxing is no exception. If I had to say one of the things we need to have – and are in the process of developing – it’s a smartphone app.

Another big request, which we do offer, is HIPAA compliance. We are also one of the few online fax companies that will sign a business associate agreement.

FAF: What business size do you see the most online fax demand come from?

SRFax: It’s really split in two – we have a lot of customers with smaller, home-based businesses who are buying the Home 200-page plan. Then on the business side, the majority of customers are well over the 2,500-page plan. About 10-15% of our customers buy plans in the middle from 800-2,500 pages per month. The rest are either small business owners or large corporations that need well over that amount.

FAF: What do people not know about the fax industry?

SRFax: There’s been a lot of growth in this industry in IP faxing. But I don’t think it has staying power. Faxes are transmitted by sound, and that Internet phone line doesn’t always work well for that. If you get any noise interference on the line, it’s lethal for faxing. The general public and even some businesses don’t understand that an Internet phone line doesn’t work that well. People will go to VoIP-based systems, it doesn’t work, and they end up coming to us.

FAF: What’s the most interesting thing that’s happening now in the fax industry?

SRFax: That the industry is moving toward cloud-based services. A lot of people don’t know that Internet faxing or cloud-based services exist, and it’s exciting to see that trend reversing and people looking for services like ours, as opposed to looking for hardware or legacy service.

People have been predicting that the fax will die for a long time, but I don’t see that happening. There are too many industries that need it – there would have to be a major shift in thinking across many industries for faxing to start tapering off.

I think another thing to be aware of is that for cloud-based services, the waters have been muddied badly over the last five or six years. When we started 10 years ago, there were only six or seven providers. Today there’s probably 50. But of those 50, half of them have terrible customer service and aren’t reliable. Customers sign up with a cheap service, have a bad experience, and end up thinking the entire industry is bad. But if they’re serious about remaining with a cloud-based service, they’ll get to a good provider.

Conclusion

Whether you’ve got a home office or are building a business that will have to scale up rapidly, faxing is an important tool. Now that faxing has been freed from the fax machine, it can provide an easy, secure, and mobile way to send and receive documents. And as with many industries, the growth of cloud-based technologies will only help Internet faxing grow and become more feature-rich.

More and more services are moving to the cloud, from faxing to management tools. While many have subscription models, there are also a lot of free versions of cloud services that can help with organization, communication, and productivity. Here’s a look at five of the top free cloud services out there.

Dropbox: storage

Dropbox’s free account comes with 2GB of storage, on the smaller side compared with other free services. But it’s a very solid service that’s widely used. It allows you and your coworkers to access and edit files or documents stored on the cloud, and it will automatically sync files. Launched in 2008 by two MIT students, Dropbox was one of the earlier players in cloud storage.

The storage and sharing service has mobile apps available on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Kindle Fire devices, making it very easy to access your account.

Trello: management/productivity

There are a lot of productivity and task management tools out there. We like Trello because it’s very visual, very detailed, and very easy to use. It’s a free service, although you can upgrade to Trello Gold for $45 annually, or get it free by inviting new members.

Trello lets you use boards – as many as you want – to organize anything from your kids’ extracurricular activities to product management. Within each board is a set of lists, onto which you can add cards. You can color code those cards, add notes to them, assign them to people or teams, and drag them from one list to another as a task moves through a sequence of events. In print that may sound overwhelming, but the interface is simply-designed and intuitive. Trello also lets you upload files from your computer, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, and OneDrive.

Google Drive: backup and collaboration

Google Drive offers an impressive amount of storage and syncing for free. Along with its companion apps Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, it offers an office suite that lets you create documents, edit, save, and collaborate. It offers an impressive 15GB of space for free.

Since it is a Google product, some people are uneasy about data and privacy. If that’s a real concern, it might be better to go with a syncing service or office suite that makes anonymity a priority. You can even build your own cloud with devices like Transporter.

Otherwise, it’s hard to beat the services you get with Google Drive, since it offers significant free space, real-time collaboration, and document creation.

FaxZero: faxing

FaxZero works best for individuals or businesses with limited faxing needs. On the plus side, the free service has a simple interface and is easy to set up. It does brand cover pages, but you can opt to pay $1.99 to have a clean cover page. It supports DOC, DOCX, and PDF files, but you can only attach three files at a time. You can send three pages at a time, and up to five faxes per day, for a total of 15 pages per day.

However, you can only send – not receive – faxes with this service.

FreshBooks: finance

FreshBooks bills itself as “cloud accounting.” It really shines with invoices, and gives users a lot of flexibility in creating them. An invoice list shows you the status of every invoice, and you can personalize invoices with tear-off stubs, a logo, and customer messages.

FreshBooks also lets you track time and expenses. One nice feature is that you can take pictures of receipts with your smartphone and attach them into your expenses. You can also assign categories, and import expenses by connecting to your bank or PayPal. Time-tracking can work for individuals, or for teams.

FreshBooks does not let you do account tracking or payroll, however, so it’s probably best for smaller businesses.

image via Creative Commons

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