Benefits of IP Telephony on the System i platform

We can see that IP Telephony brings many benefits to the table for enterprises, but why should enterprises be interested in IBM’s offering of 3Com’s IP Telephony solution on the System i platform? The answer to this question can be found within the IBM System i platform, the 3Com IP Telephony solution, and in the shared values of the two products.

With System i and 3Com IP Telephony, enterprises benefit from one integrated, secure, and reliable communications solution delivered by two industry leaders:

򐂰 Lower your traditional telephony costs and enhance productivity with IP Telephony solutions

򐂰 Implement a complete IP Telephony solution on one easy-to-manage system using System i management tools

򐂰 Extend the advantages of simplicity, integration, vertical growth, and security to IP Telephony communications

In today's highly competitive business environment, companies everywhere want to extract business advantage from every technology in the enterprise, especially client-facing communications such as their telephony systems. At the same time, many companies face the challenge of an overly complex IT environment. With the System i IP Telephony solution, you can benefit from an integrated business system that can help you:

򐂰 Become more responsive to clients

򐂰 Improve productivity

򐂰 Operate without interruption

򐂰 Secure data and communications without large up-front investments in time, skills, or money

3Com IP Telephony and the System i platform deliver the perfect solution to help achieve these benefits. Companies of all sizes are replacing traditional phone systems with IP Telephony solutions to realize both the productivity benefits of easily accessible advanced applications and the infrastructure cost savings resulting from a single, converged voice and data network.

1.3.1 System i advantages

The IBM System i platform is renowned for its reliability, scalability, and integration.

Enterprises of all kinds rely on this platform to run their business-critical applications, ensuring the maximum amount of up-time and integrity of the data in a secure environment

operating system provide several important benefits including virtualization of I/O resources, dynamic allocation of I/O resources, and server consolidation. The System i platform supports on-demand scalability in processor power, memory, and disk storage space.

As enterprises grow and merge with other enterprises, the sheer number of servers running specific applications across the business presents a maintenance and management

challenge. Server consolidation becomes another key benefit of the System i platform, which provides a single scalable platform with a common set of management tools, reducing the costs of training and simplifying IT support requirements. Figure 1-2 illustrates how multiple server types can be consolidated on the System i platform.

Figure 1-2 Server consolidation on the System i platform

Relying on open standards helps to ease the integration of different systems and applications.

Open standards helps to prevent enterprises from being locked in to a particular proprietary solution, providing them with the ability to make choices that make sense for their business needs.

The ability to provide scalability for processors, memory, and disk storage on the System i platform means enterprises can grow either in size or number of applications in a simpler manner. The System i platform supports the ability to dynamically allocate computing resources which provides on-demand capacity for enterprises with workloads that vary over time. In addition, the System i platform supports the virtualization of I/O resources so that applications can share the same hardware without even knowing it is being shared. This allows simplification of backup strategies, helps to reduce hardware costs, and provides a common set of tools to manage the hardware.

1.3.2 Benefits of 3Com IP Telephony

The 3Com IP Telephony solution is based on the same concepts of open standards, reliability, scalability, and integration as the System i platform. The 3Com IP Telephony solution is implemented within a hardened Linux operating system that allows it to easily run within a System i partition in an appliance-like manner with no additional Linux licensing required. The 3Com IP Telephony solution allows enterprises to implement converged applications like IP Telephony, IP Messaging, IP Conferencing, and IP Presence on a single platform with centralized administration in a secure, reliable, and scalable manner.

3Com has been a leader in developing open standards in networking throughout its history.

By supporting open standards, the 3Com IP Telephony solution can operate on most any vendor’s IP data network infrastructure that supports the standards for quality of service (for example, 802.1p and 802.1Q) and power over Ethernet (802.3af).

The 3Com IP Telephony solution supports integration with other applications, such as e-mail, using open standards (for example SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4), which allows enterprises to gain productivity with their existing infrastructure and help reduce overall costs by maintaining their original investment in the applications.

As illustrated in Figure 1-3, telephony is being transformed into an enterprise application that enables convergence of voice and data. With IP Telephony, the infrastructure for enterprise computing and enterprise communications is united. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications are store-and-forward, database-oriented workflows that coexist on the same network infrastructure as the company’s real-time communications application (telephony), as does e-mail and Web browsing.

Figure 1-3 Converged applications

But unified infrastructure is only the beginning. Enterprise deployment of next-generation convergence applications (real-time, human-to-human communications) will depend on a robust and open platform capable of IP Telephony, presence-aware applications, and even messaging applications. In upcoming releases, 3Com will be enhancing integration of the IP Telephony system with other IBM applications such as Lotus Sametime.

With a completely end-to-end standards-based enterprise-class system using SIP, the System i IP Telephony solution supports integration with other third-party SIP-based equipment such as hard phones, soft phones, applications, and devices. 3Com maintains a program for voice hardware and software vendors to perform interoperability testing to ensure the highest degree of compatibility with the IP Telephony solution.

3Com has been shipping IP Telephony solutions to the small to mid-size market since 1998 and has over 30,000 IP Telephony installations in over 30 countries worldwide. This focus on the small-to-mid-size market is another shared value between 3Com and the IBM System i platform, helping to assure customers that their needs are understood and will be met.

Converged

Reliability and scalability are the other pillars of the 3Com IP Telephony solution that match the System i platform directly. Built-in redundancy of the IP Telephony solution takes advantage of the reliability characteristics of the System i platform to provide maximum up-time. With its ability to support geographic redundancy, the 3Com IP Telephony solution can provide voice services even in the event of a power or network failure at one location.

Simplicity of administration and ease of use allow enterprises to take advantage of centralized management of their voice applications. In fact, in 2006, this survivable

architecture has garnered the 3Com IP Telephony solution an award for “the most survivable, distributed IP-PBX” in the industry from Miercom, a leading technology testing firm.

The shared values of IBM and 3Com provide many potential benefits to implementing a System i IP Telephony solution, including:

򐂰 Reliability

򐂰 Scalability

򐂰 Using a single System i machine for the IP Telephony solution, business-critical applications and IT infrastructure

򐂰 Dynamic resource allocation

򐂰 Virtualization of resources

򐂰 Focus on small to medium-sized enterprises

򐂰 No Linux licensing required to run the System i IP Telephony solution

򐂰 End-to-end SIP architecture for simple integration with SIP-based applications and legacy voice network equipment

򐂰 Consolidation of voice services on a single computing platform

򐂰 Simplicity in administration with centralized control of telephony resources

򐂰 Centralized management of converged voice applications and data network elements

򐂰 Advanced features and low-cost phone calls over data network

򐂰 Unified messaging, conferencing, instant messaging

򐂰 Integration with business applications and collaboration applications

򐂰 Support of mobile and remote workers within a secure framework

We’ve discussed many benefits and advantages to implementing IP Telephony on the System i platform, but these are going to be different for every enterprise and can be difficult to visualize. To help quantify the Return On Investment (ROI) of an IP Telephony solution for your enterprise, IBM and 3Com provide an ROI Analysis tool that analyzes your current telephony spending and opportunities for improvement, quantifying the value of upgrading to one of several IP Telephony solution options. The tool uses telephony cost metrics to provide initial estimates, then allows you to customize the data based on your experience and needs.