IBM is building an increasingly interesting set of full-featured unified communications appliances without running into direct competition with its business suppliers in telephony.

Microsoft tends to get most of the limelight when it comes to traditional software vendors seeking to make a name for themselves in the business communications solution market. After all, the company's Office Communications Server 2007 is not only an impressive platform for corporate instant messaging, it is also being actively marketed (and adopted) as an alternative to traditional PBX systems. Of course IBM's strategy has been quite different, with the company not developing call control software of its own. However, this has not stopped IBM from delivering a growing number of unified communications solutions with call control software built in. Below I look at a number of them.Lotus Foundations Reach (previously written up in NoJitter) is part of a portfolio of software platforms for SMBs. Based on technology from Net Integration Technologies (acquired by IBM in 2008), the various Foundations appliances are designed as compact, easy to install/manage platforms for collaboration, email, office productivity, security, and other software. The Foundations Reach edition includes Lotus Sametime Standard for presence, instant messaging, and web collaboration. It also allows some telephony functionality to reside on the Foundations server as well. This presently comes in the form of ShoreTel's ShoreWare Director management software--along with the company's centralized voicemail, unified messaging, and auto attendant--residing on the appliance along with the IBM software. NEC Unified Solutions says it will port its Sphericall PBX software to Lotus Foundations Reach as well, but details of this are not yet available.

IBM System i IP Telephony is similar to Foundations Reach in that it packages a combination of IBM collaboration and messaging software on the one hand and third-party telephony on the other onto a single system. This differs from Foundations Reach in that all software runs on an IBM Power System server (not a Net Integration Technologies appliance) and can scale to more than 1,000 users (not topping out at 500 like Reach). Also different is IBM's choice in telephony partners. Rather than ShoreTel and NEC, IBM System i IP Telephony runs Nortel's Software Communications Systems (SCS) and 3Com's VCX. And all call processing software resides on a partition within the IBM server, unlike the ShoreTel solution for Foundations, in which call processing comes from the ShoreGear switches as is typical in ShoreTel's distributed telephony architecture.

Smart Cube is another recently introduced all-in-one platform from IBM that can provide an all-in-one server for security, backup, middleware, and a variety of IBM and third-party software. This is purchased in an Apple iTunes-like online marketplace. To date telephony software from two vendors can run on Smart Cube. Nortel can run the SCS software on it, while Asterisk For Smart Cube runs Digium's open source PBX software on a Linux partition. Again, the target market is SMB, and again the value proposition is consolidating call control and other applications onto a single system.

Sametime, of course, is IBM's flagship unified communications and collaboration software. It has no native call control software but, as noted above, can be readily integrated with a wide range of PBX systems. This is either done on a one-off basis, with vendor-specific integration with Aastra Clearspan, Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise, Avaya Aura Communication Manager, Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Nortel Communications Server 1000, and so forth. Or an underlying middleware layer can be used to connect Sametime to different PBX systems in a multi-vendor environment. This capability is at the crux of IBM's Sametime Unified Telephony solution, released earlier this year. The middleware capability comes from components of Siemens Enterprise Communications' OpenScape software being used with Unified Telephony, though Nortel is marketing its Agile Communication Environment as a viable alternative for this.

All this is to say that though IBM does not develop its own telephony systems (it went that route years ago with its acquisition of ROLM Communications, subsequently sold off to Siemens), smart use of technology partnerships has allowed it to bring a number of all-in-one business communications platforms to market. This strategy has allowed IBM to remain focused on its areas of expertise--server hardware and software, collaboration and messaging applications--letting telephony experts deliver the real-time voice technology that is their forte. I do worry over how well coordinated are the various IBM divisions in introducing voice systems that incorporate this or that PBX software. Delivering Asterisk on the Smart Cube, 3Com VCX on Power Server, NEC Sphericall on Reach, each providing an all-in-one type of appliances for roughly the same sized business...it all seems a bit discombobulated at times. I'd be more comfortable with a single type of appliance for a specific market segment even if different telephony systems developers are ultimately delivering the real-time voice software for it. But this does not detract from the fact IBM is building an increasingly interesting set of full-featured unified communications appliances without running into direct competition with its business suppliers in the telephony space.IBM is building an increasingly interesting set of full-featured unified communications appliances without running into direct competition with its business suppliers in telephony.