IBM puts 3Com's IP PBX onto all-in-one processor

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 25 October 2006 11:26

Business IT - Technology

IBM and 3 Com have teamed up to offer what they claim is the first IP telephony system designed to run on the same processor as that hosting the user's main IT applications, IBM's all-in-one platform.

The IBM System i IP telephony product is based on IBM's "all-in-one" business computing platform and 3Com's VCX IP PBX. According to the two companies, it "makes IP telephony accessible to businesses of all sizes and requirements by allowing them to implement a complete IP telephony solution on one powerful, yet easy-to-manage platform."

They claim it represents "a dramatic shift from the current appliance model for IP telephony environments, which requires that customers dedicate one or more separate servers to support each function of the telephony suite - call processing, messaging and conferencing." This approach, they say presents integration and systems management challenges, especially for small and medium-sized businesses that may have limited IT resources.

Mark Shearer, general manager of IBM System i, said: "System i IP telephony can support less than 100 to thousands of phone users and our analysis shows that it can deliver a return on investment in months, not years."

IBM says it chose 3Com as its IP telephony partner for System i based on the two companies' common values of integration, ease-of-use, reliability, scalability, security and support for open standards such as session initiation protocol (SIP) which enables the 3Com VCX to be more easily integrated with other applications running on the System i, including collaborative applications like Lotus Sametime and Domino as well as third party applications.