WorldCity Business Magazine

just the fax, ma'am

by Mary Dempsey

A South Florida firm proves that faxes have been enhanced, not replaced, by higher-tech communications.

In this tech-savvy world, is there still a place for faxes?

Venali, a Coral Gables company with offices in Germany, Singapore and the United Kingdom, not only answers with a resounding “yes,” but it makes a point to explain that faxes have become as cutting edge as everything else.

In fact, you can fax without a fax machine. And that’s mostly what Venali is all about.

Venali offers companies big and small the option of tapping its services to send faxes over the Internet, via e-mail or through Venali’s own network. Although some of those faxes may be received on old-fashioned machines with paper, many are simply processed by computer and zipped around the globe in a flash. Not only does the process add speed to the transmission while reducing cost, but it allows fax users and recipients to electronically sort, file and process the communications right on their computers.

“For example, an accounting rep can go through all the overdue invoices in a company’s system and sort out every invoice that’s overdue by 60 days,” explained Brad Nickel, Venali’s director of marketing. They can send a fax and cover sheet and they can get a confirmation that the fax was received.”

For companies that already have plenty of higher-tech methods of communication, faxes remain a way to communicate with customers that have not yet embraced e-mail.

“Faxes are booming. We’re seeing huge growth among large corporations that installed fax servers in the last five to 10 years,” said Nickel. “They’re replacing their servers, using our services.”

He explained, for example, that companies still rely on faxes for contracts and documents that require signatures.

“We have a number of law firms that use us for faxing documents back and forth,” Nickel said. “We have one customer that is a huge construction organization. It sells construction supplies to hundreds and hundreds of small contractors a lot of whom are not computer savvy but they need updates on pricing and materials.”

He said financial services companies use electronic faxes to submit loan applications and doctors use them for prescriptions and to exchange medical information quickly.

But Venali’s services go beyond just faxes. “We’re basically a message delivery network,” Nickel said. “We also handle telex messages for a lot of the freight industry. And we do voice-message delivery like updates of scores in soccer games or notifications for political campaigns. And we have an e-mail system that allows large corporations to utilize us for communications to customers, such as for accounting and invoicing.”

Top competitors in the field include J2 Global Communications in Los Angeles.

Venali, which has about 60 employees in Coral Gables and another 25 in its international offices, sells branded faxing to voice-over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, customers and is poised to launch new text-messaging and multi-media messaging services. That comes on the heels of an announcement that Venali has special fax services for companies doing business in China.

“Even for companies with a minimal presence in China, we can provide them with a fax number in China so other people in China or elsewhere in Asia can fax them locally,” Nickel explained.

Venali’s customer list runs the range from small businesses that pay $10 a month for Internet fax services to Fortune 1000 companies that fax hundreds of people with the click of a button or use other messaging systems.