IP fax picks up steam: Vendor alliances, real-time capabilities add fuel to red-hot market

On the verge of what's expected to be the largest ever Voice on the Net show in Washington this week, several Internet protocol fax vendors and service providers are getting a jump-start on the expected flood of announcements.

Among the anticipated announcements this week is a joint development and marketing alliance between NetCentric Corp. and Ascend Communications. Under terms of the agreement, the two companies will integrate NetCentric's FaxStorm Internet fax technology with Ascend's Max remote access platform. GTE-Internetworking and PSINet already have endorsed the combination and said they will use it to expand their existing IP fax services.

The alliance is the beginning of NetCentric's open gateway strategy and will be followed by a joint marketing and sales program.

"We look at this as the first step in validation of our strategy," said Paul MacKay, president and chief operating officer of NetCentric. "It's a very clean integration from our perspective. We have to add no hardware or software into their platform."

Instead, the company is integrating fax capabilities into the Max platform through an open application programming interface Ascend published earlier this year.

The integration means a significantly larger market for NetCentric. Ascend currently has an installed base of 3.2 million Max ports. "Those network service providers don't have to go about installing a new infrastructure for [public network]/IP communications," said MacKay.

In another expected announcement, Voice and Data Systems will unveil a new service that allows carriers to offer real-time IP fax capabilities. Selling under the iService brand name, VDS will operate its own network of fax gateways and sell the PC-to-fax service wholesale to carriers, which then can resell to corporate users.

"We decided to take a stronger and more direct approach. We're giving telcos and [competitive local exchange carriers] a clean way of getting into Internet faxing," said Dan Dorsey, director of business development.

Using two separate services, users will dial into a local number provided by a service provider, log on to VDS' gateway and send faxes via the Internet to anywhere in the world. The real-time capability provides instant feedback on the fax's status, something corporate users are demanding, said Dorsey.

The company's next step will be a real-time IP fax-to-fax service, an area in which several companies are currently beginning to demonstrate service, he added.

Coyote Technologies, which manufactures fax gateways and operates a network under a separate subsidiary, recently demonstrated such capabilities at Telecom Business 98. According to Eddie Jones, senior product manager, users aren't just asking for real-time capability, they're insisting on it. "All of our customers are saying if you don't have real-time fax, don't even bring the box," he said.