Fax makes a comeback.

• Author: Tillman, Ashley
• Position: High Tech

Tom Linhard and Robert Lang have been through the fax wars and are back on the front lines. As executives of two different Colorado companies that are reviving the use of fax technology, they've moved beyond the national battle over laws that prevent flooding companies with unsolicited faxed material. "Most believed e-mail would replace faxing," said Linhard, chief operating officer of Parker-based FaxCore Corp. But that, of course, was before e-mail became the substitute clutter for faxes in business mailboxes.

Linhard and Lang, who is president of the Westminster-based Mobility Software Division of Avanquest USA, are involved in creating symbiotic solutions to combining the use of both e-mail and fax to benefit small and large businesses alike.

FaxCore, a $2.5 million company with 12 employees, received an Editor's Choice award from Network Computing magazine in November 2004, and saw its revenues jump 500 percent since receiving the honor, said Linhard. Describing his company, he said, "It is a Microsoft, net-based fax server system which centrally manages all inbound and outbound fax communications, and provides comprehensive document archiving capabilities." FaxCore's customers range from public companies that must maintain thousands of documents to stay compliant with the new Sarbanes-Oxley securities law, to health-care companies that must remain compliant with HIPAA regulations that protect medical records.

Avanquest's Lang said his company's primary product, Faxtools, integrates faxes into e-mail programs, allowing printable documents to be retrieved, managed and controlled. Through Faxtools, he said, the worlds of paper and electronic documents are fused.

And yet the company is moving into still newer media. One of Avanquest's latest technologies. Connection Manager PRO, converts a cell phone into a computer modem, allowing customers to e-mail and fax from anywhere they can use the phone.

The growing business of both companies serves to illustrate that faxing is no longer just about getting papers to their...