A funny thing happened en route to the humble fax machine’s quiet exit from communications technology. Faxing didn’t actually check out; it went underground instead. More precisely, it launched into the cloud, where it still plays a valuable role for health care, legal and other verticals that demand strict data privacy accommodations.
Don’t sound the death knell for faxing. Each year, more than 9 billion transmissions are sent or received each year in the United States. That’s the kind of busy signal Brendan Nolan finds compelling. The president and CEO of eGoldFax knows there are many organizations that rely on faxing in no small measure, but he’s content to have little competition among providers in the office technology dealership realm.
Despite the perception, faxing isn’t a technology frozen in time. eGoldFax is funneling investment dollars into a number of areas: establishing connectors for many major manufacturer MFPs (including Sharp, Ricoh, Xerox and Konica Minolta), a new desktop app that’s faxing’s answer to Microsoft’s Outlook email client, and a grassroots marketing program to help dealers create more market opportunities.
Nolan sat down with ENX Magazine to detail how eGoldFax pushes forward with new wrinkles for a technology with a heritage that traces back to 1843. That’s roughly 30 years before the typewriter debuted (and, Nolan might point out, it’s outlived the typewriter by about 30 years as well).
Talk a little about the evolution of eGoldFax and the channels it serves.
Nolan: Our original fax server product, GoldFax, has been on the market for over 25 years. Approximately seven years ago, we decided to host our server product in the cloud, and eGoldFax was born. We’ve been active in the MFP/MFD reseller channel for many years. Some of these partners previously sold our server product, GoldFax, so it was a natural transition for them to become eGoldFax partners. Today, small businesses to large enterprises prefer eGoldFax as it’s designed to meet diverse needs by ensuring that every faxed document is delivered quickly, securely and without interruption. Our customers are most often in the medical, educational, government, legal and financial sectors because they face more rigorous data privacy regulations, making eGoldFax the ideal fax service solution.
What are the core strengths of eGoldFax, and what makes it unique to the cloud faxing space?
Nolan: We pride ourselves on our U.S.-based customer service team that regularly goes above and beyond to provide superior service to our partners and customers. Our mantra is that we never tell a customer that the problem they’re experiencing isn’t our problem. We try to help our customers, no matter what.
Also, eGoldFax really is the optimal cloud faxing technology for businesses of all sizes, whether they’re using MFPs, desktop computers or mobile devices. Our technology allows unlimited users and MFP connectors, even if the customer has a mix of MFP brands. And our unique, multi-tier technology infrastructure provides a fully redundant fax solution that enables the largest faxes to come through successfully—they’ll never experience a busy signal!
What were some of the highlights for your company during 2024?
Nolan: It was an exciting year for us. We’ve enhanced our product offering with the launch of our new eGoldFax Desktop App, which allows our customers to manage their fax traffic in one place just like people use Microsoft Outlook for managing email. We’ve also developed many MFP connectors. We can now directly connect Sharp, Ricoh, Xerox, HP, Epson, Kyocera and Konica Minolta to our eGoldFax platform. A user can walk up to any of these devices, and if the eGoldFax Connector is installed, they’ll have the same user experience across all the devices. We’ve also developed direct integration to the print management platforms PaperCut and MyQ. It’s been a busy year.
Additionally, we expanded our customer service and marketing teams with highly experienced and diverse talent. We’re committed to faster response times, greater technical assistance, prompt billing support, and personalized service to increase customer satisfaction and retention. From a marketing perspective, we’re dialing up our industry advertising and social media engagement to communicate with a broader, ever-changing audience about the benefits of eGoldFax. Simultaneously, we’re launching a grassroots marketing outreach program among our resellers to understand how we can help them create more demand for eGoldFax among their prospects and customers. Our goal is to help resellers convert more effectively and efficiently—it’s a win-win for all of us.
The eGoldFax end-users include many organizations with strict compliance measures. Tell us about how your protocols help address security.
Nolan: We have an enterprise-class fax transmission backbone. eGoldFax is hosted in the globally renowned Microsoft Azure U.S. cloud data centers on both the commercial and government platforms, ensuring maximum information security, faxing reliability and long-term sustainability. eGoldFax’s multi-tier infrastructure provides a fully redundant fax solution that enables the largest faxes to go through successfully, coupled with fax confirmation notifications for peace of mind. All fax traffic is encrypted in transit using the latest TLS technologies. eGoldFax also uses multiple redundant local and long-distance telecommunication carriers to ensure the highest uptime and coverage for sending and receiving faxes.
We’re committed to faster response times, greater technical assistance, prompt billing support, and personalized service to increase customer satisfaction and retention.
– Brendan Nolan
The eGoldFax Administrative Portal is exceptional because it features two-factor authentication and HTTPS security for managing accounts, user access and the unlimited fax archive, which is fortified with 256-bit AES encryption. eGoldFax ensures compliance with the strictest data-privacy regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, and FERPA.
What areas can investments target in the next two years to build on your offering?
Nolan: We continue to invest in building out our technology offering. We have active projects to deliver an OCR (optical character recognition) capability to our customers. We’re also enhancing the interoperability between our eGoldFax platform and all the major EMR/EHR medical record systems. Both of these projects will be delivered in the first quarter of 2025, and then we expect to continue enhancing their capabilities throughout the remainder of the year and beyond. Simultaneously, we’re investing in many resources to improve our onboarding process so that it’s clear, smooth and easy. We’re refreshing our desktop application to be more user-friendly and enhancing our reseller portal to improve the user experience.
Tell us a little about your marketing strategy within the office dealer space.
Nolan: We’ve hired three additional marketing people over the last four months. We’re going to be very focused on helping our dealers understand and promote eGoldFax. There are many organizations out there that do a lot more faxing than people realize. We want to work with our partners in the office dealer space to provide a better faxing solution to their customers. Many organizations are still using what we would call traditional fax methods: fax machines or MFP fax cards connected to telephone lines to send and receive faxes, or they could be using an older fax server product that’s either end of life or approaching it.
As our dealer channel gets more familiar with the benefits of a cloud faxing solution such as eGoldFax and they introduce cloud faxing to their customers, we’ll work alongside our partners to demonstrate and explain to their customers how eGoldFax is the optimum comprehensive and secure faxing solution
– Brendan Nolan
Another critical marketing message is that the FCC declared in 2022 that phone companies no longer need to support their copper phone lines and Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS). Resultantly, many phone carriers are canceling or significantly raising rates on POTS lines to push customers toward IP-based telephone service, which is unreliable for faxing. Fortunately, eGoldFax is uniquely designed using Primary Rate Interface (PRI), a technology that provides a constant signal for reliable and secure faxing. And as I mentioned previously, customers will enjoy the benefits of no incoming busy signals so they never miss an inbound fax. eGoldFax is the ideal solution as it’s independent of a traditional voice telephone system and/or service.
What do you feel is the path to growth for your company?
Nolan: It’s estimated that over 9 billion faxes are sent or received in the U.S. each year. There’s major room for growth within this sector. As our dealer channel gets more familiar with the benefits of a cloud faxing solution such as eGoldFax and they introduce cloud faxing to their customers, we’ll work alongside our partners to demonstrate and explain to their customers how eGoldFax is the optimum comprehensive and secure faxing solution.
eGoldFax is proactively working on many technical advancements and optimizations that will also propel our growth. There’s more to come on that in the future.
What are your company’s goals for the next 12 months?
Nolan: We have multiple software engineering projects such as OCR and medical records systems interoperability that we’re bringing to the market. The first versions of these systems will be available in Q1 2025. We also want to continue investing in these technologies by adding as much capability as possible. We’re also growing our team so we can continue to offer world-class customer service and increased marketing support to both our partners and our customers.
