U.K.-based Aculab has broadened its telephony software portfolio by adding fax capabilities to its Aculab Cloud platform.

The addition should come as good news for fax broadcasters and service providers who often need to handle thousands of faxes each day. Traditionally speaking, operators need to provision farms of servers to accommodate sending and receiving faxes, a resource-intensive process that requires supplementary hardware and software, says Aculab.

With the newly-updated Aculab Cloud, organizations can simply write their own fax application and register it with Aculab. Like most cloud platforms, users will be charged on a pay-as-you-go model. Developers can write their own applications using either Python or .NET.

"Making it easier for people to add telephony or use telephony to aid their business work flows is a prime objective," says Faye McClenahan, Head of Strategic Marketing at Aculab. "By adding fax to Aculab Cloud, where resources can be pooled, shared and utilized on demand, we are helping reduce costs and making it viable and affordable to both enterprise and SMBs."

Fax capabilities embedded into the Aculab Cloud platform include:

• T.30 fax termination up to V.17 speeds.
• Call progress monitoring (incoming and outgoing) and automatic detection of fax calls.
• Dynamic switching between fax and voice within a call.
• Group 3 TIFF image file manipulation library.
• Multiple page formats and properties and application control of individual pages; unlimited page length and header/footer formatting; and fax on demand.

In addition to its new fax capabilities, Aculab Cloud provides a relatively painless avenue for creating unique telephony applications. Available application options include IVR, voicemail and voice broadcast systems.

All Things FoIP reports that the Aculab Cloud platform rate for fax is just one cent per minute plus an additional telephony fee of about 1.2 cents per minute.