Company type | Private |
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Industry | Software |
Founded | 1986 |
Founder | S.K. Ho 何曙光 |
Headquarters | , |
Key people |
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Owner |
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Website | www |
Biscom, Inc. is a privately held software company founded in 1986. [1] Headquartered in Westford, MA, its main focus is providing secure document delivery solutions[ buzzword ] to regulated industries.
In March 2024, it was announced that the firm was acquired by Concord Technologies. [2]
The company develops and markets fax server solutions[ buzzword ] that facilitate inbound and outbound electronic fax communications, as well as managed file transfer, enterprise file synchronization and sharing, and document conversion solutions.[ buzzword ] It is known for its ability to scale to deliver millions of documents per day and for a history of reliability that is required for mission critical processes.
Founder and current Chairman of Biscom, S.K. Ho was previously the [3] Director of Engineering at Wang Laboratories, where he designed and developed the Wang Word Processor and Wang Professional Image Systems; he holds nine major patents. Ho earned a BSME from Ordinance Engineering College in Taiwan and an MSEE from Drexel University.
Recognizing the opportunity to combine facsimile communications with computer applications, S.K. Ho left Wang Laboratories to found Biscom, Inc., and thus he launched the fax server industry. Early application of Biscom's fax server, the FAXCOM Server, applied print output from mainframe applications to an electronic form, and merged this into a single TIFF document which could be delivered electronically via fax. This was a vast improvement over earlier processes in which the mainframe data would be printed to paper forms, and then mailed or sent via paper fax machine.
Fax servers have continually evolved since 1986, supporting desktop faxing via email, via Web browser, via mobile applications, and via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs); integrating with directory services such as Microsoft's Active Directory (and formerly Novell's eDirectory); integrating with Voice over IP (VoIP) to support T.38 Fax over IP (FoIP); supporting paper-based faxing via multi function printers; enabling fax workflows with support for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and barcode interpretation for rules based fax routing; and offering fax server capabilities in both premises and hosted solutions.[ buzzword ]
Biscom has evolved into a provider of multiple product lines, including Managed File Transfer that enable secure and auditable delivery of files of all types and sizes, and document conversion that convert to and from popular formats such as PCL (Printer Command Language), PostScript, PDF (Portable Document Format), and Microsoft Office, and Enterprise File Synchronization & Sharing that enable full IT control of data and user manageability. Biscom currently offers secure document delivery solutions[ buzzword ] that support multiple modes of transmission, document types, and workflow automation.
Fax, sometimes called telecopying or telefax, is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material, normally to a telephone number connected to a printer or other output device. The original document is scanned with a fax machine, which processes the contents as a single fixed graphic image, converting it into a bitmap, and then transmitting it through the telephone system in the form of audio-frequency tones. The receiving fax machine interprets the tones and reconstructs the image, printing a paper copy. Early systems used direct conversions of image darkness to audio tone in a continuous or analog manner. Since the 1980s, most machines transmit an audio-encoded digital representation of the page, using data compression to transmit areas that are all-white or all-black, more quickly.
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