There is always a difficult tipping point when it comes to technology, when you have to forget about the large investment you made several years ago in a hardware device or software application and face the harsh reality that it has outlived its usefulness. I know it was difficult for me to put to rest my dual floppy Tandy PC, a stand-alone 20 MB external hard drive, a reliable old daisy wheel impact printer and my original Blackberry email device (I really miss that last one.)

But progress is inevitable. Many businesses put their dedicated, thermo graphic fax machines out to pasture years ago (remember the curled paper scrolls?) replacing them with newer technology—plain paper fax machines—only to see them exchanged for multi-function peripherals a few years later. Some users equated the fax medium with the devices themselves, thinking faxing would be made obsolete by email. Yet as IT administrators at any size organization can attest, faxing hasn't gone away—not by a long shot.  To improve fax management, companies networked their fax processing, investing in fax servers and dedicated fax boards to rasterize documents prior to sending over telephony networks (PSTN.) Eventually servers were developed to support the digitizing of documents for IP transmissions. Technology marches on and another investment is sent to the scrap heap.

If all of this device replacement sounds familiar to you, you have probably reached the next tipping point: it's time to retire your fax servers. Yes they cost a lot, and they were probably paid for long ago. But set that investment aside and consider your monthly overhead for maintaining these dinosaurs: they require energy, maintenance, constant attention, and if they go out of commission for any length of time, you need an immediate backup to replace them. That commitment of effort and resources costs money, not just the hard costs of electricity and annual maintenance and support fees charged by the vendor, but opportunity and productivity losses that can be a hidden value drain.