Things at the Newcastle offices of Typex Group have been hectic since Big Blue announced it had teamed up with 3Com to deliver IP Telephony (IPT) on the System i late last year. And last week, Typex won an award for System i innovation from COMMON Europe and IBM for community services.

“This was based on the work we have done on our System i-based Playplace server project,” says Deni Wilson, Typex Group managing director.

At the end of 2005, Typex purchased a large System i 550 4-way with 1 Tb of storage and 16 Gb RAM. The intention was to use it to run the business (Typex is still going through the process of system consolidation to do this), and to showcase IBM products for customers to evaluate over an internet link (beginning with Workplace which will shortly move to Portal). 

“Our belief is that, if a customer can see and touch a product, they are more likely to buy it as they will understand it better,” says Wilson. “We called this Playplace as we felt the name clearly identified its function. We have now added IPT to our Playplace.

“As we were moving to new premises in October 2006, we wanted to install a new IP telephony system. Prior to our move, we shared offices with IBM and had links to its HICOM telephone system. We looked around and had just decided to go with BT when IBM pre-announced its new System i solution at a technical directors’ conference for UK business partners. My technical director, John Taylor, was at the conference and immediately suggested we should look at this as an alternative. We did, and several things came out of this review.

“We realised the BT solution was only IPT capable, not IPT ready. This meant we would have to upgrade to get full IPT functionality. We were used to a sophisticated solution (HICOM) so couldn't really go back to basics. We already had a large System i, plus we had a networking background -- we are AT&T business partners -- so we understood a lot of the background to IPT.

“We therefore decided we should go ahead with the IBM solution. We were shipped beta code which we installed jointly with 3Com and which we eventually went live with. It works beautifully and we have since spoken to several US customers who are as thrilled with it as we are. For the first time, at a recent user group meeting at COMMON US, I heard customers saying only positive things about a solution. That was like a breath of fresh air.”

IBM’s IPT software was developed with 3Com solely for 5xx models. It runs in a Linux partition on System i -- ie you don’t have to run it on a large number of Intel-based servers with all the attendant complexity of such a set up. The software is SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) end-to-end (as opposed to SIP-enabled which most other offerings are) which means applications can be integrated with telephony in the future.

Typex will shortly be testing the new beta code linking IPT to Lotus Notes Sametime to provide full collaboration, something that’s eagerly anticipated.

“Once we had the solution up and running ourselves, it seemed obvious we should also offer it on our Playplace,” says Wilson. “What we have put in place is a demo on demand environment. We are currently offering this to other Business Partners (BPs) who now need to get a greater understanding of the System i IPT solution but who have no System i or IPT skills. BPs can purchase a set of demo handsets and a router from IBM at a reasonable price and we can give them access to the solution over the internet for demo and learning purposes. Our solution includes a fully-scripted demo with support.

“We are currently working on offering a trial on demand environment where BPs and customers will have access to their own partition on our System i allowing them to play with IPT and test the full functionality and ease of use. We believe this will be very valuable in evaluating the IPT solution.”

Frank Booty