With Analog Phone Lines Fading Out, JustTech Pushes Cloud Fax

‘We’ve been educating our clients on the discontinuation of the analog phone lines, and encouraging them to move to cloud fax, so they won’t have interrupted service,’ Josh Justice, founder, owner & president of JustTech, tells CRN.

With many major telecom carriers including Verizon and AT&T announcing they’re discontinuing analog phone lines this year, Josh Justice, founder, owner & president of JustTech, is encouraging his clients to make the move to cloud fax.

JustTech, headquartered in La Plata, Md., is a technology company founded in 2006 providing print solutions, network & IT solutions and custom Xerox app solutions. The company serves more than 3,000 clients in seven locations across four states.

Cloud fax allows users to send and receive faxed documents through an email program or web portal without the need for any on-premises hardware or software, Justice (pictured above) told CRN.

“It makes the move to cloud fax all the more urgent,” he said. “We’ve been educating our clients on the discontinuation of the analog phone lines and encouraging them to move to cloud fax so they won’t have interrupted service.”

Justice said JustTech was the first to create an app that’s compatible with both Xerox as well as 30 cloud fax providers. The app sits on the Xerox device and makes sending a hard copy document with cloud fax easier, he said. Instead of having to scan in something and upload it through a web portal, users just put the document on the device and hit send.

“More and more clients have looked to move to cloud fax because it’s cheaper, it’s more secure, and you get encrypted backup,” Justice said. “It’s more flexible than traditional fax.”

Cloud faxing was introduced about 15 years ago by different manufacturers, such as eGoldFax and eFax, Justice said. Those companies’ marketing message at the time was “you can port your fax number to us.” They had terminals with phone lines coming in, and then they could use a web portal to send out faxes. Incoming faxes could then be sent to a printer or email.

“We saw more and more clients in recent years, wanting to use that and asking us about that, because we were their technology partner for copiers, printers and IT services,” he said. “We started reselling cloud-based services. But then we saw clients complaining if they had a hard copy document, you had to scan it into your computer, save it and then upload it through a web portal.”

Justice said his company then decided to build an app for Xerox multifunction printers that converts the hard copy document at the device when you scan it to cloud fax, and then sends it out via the cloud fax service.

“That’s been pretty popular for our clients in the last two years,” he said. “Some of the clients that moved to cloud fax wanted to do it for the advantages such as encrypted backup, some wanted to do it because they weren’t always in the office and they want to be able to send a fax from home. Others also did it because they moved to Voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP], and they didn’t want to keep any analog ones.”

With analog phone lines going away, Justice said clients will have to decide on what they’re going to do, whether they’re going to give up faxing altogether or move to another tool that works with it.