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IBM and 3Com Plan First Internet Telephony Suite

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the at-last-I-can-call-my-mother dept.

TechnoGuyRob writes "IBM and 3Com, a company best known for its computer network infrastructure products, are teaming up to provide the world's first IP telephony suite. From the article: 'IBM and 3Com intend to offer the 3Com VCX suite of IP telephony Relevant Products/Services from solutions on IBM's System i business-computing platform... This means clients will be able to run business and telephony applications simultaneously managed by the System i's tools.' The application is intended for the Linux-on-Power operating system; so yes, it will run Linux."

1 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Ahhh 3com by matth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This remind me of a story a friend of mine told me. He told his company NOT to purchase a 3com VoIP system, but they didn't listen. They had nothing but grief thereafter. The 3com VoIP system would not read line voltages correctly from a Vonage ATA (they were using Vonage for phone lines for some reason). Further, it would not work with 'SIP', as 3com had their own proprietary protocol. It was later found out that 3com firmware had a bug in it that prevented the Vonage line from hanging up. SO they downgraded... then other things broke.

    This is exactly why we are dumping our Nortel phone system for Asterisk. Proprietary stuff is junk! The Nortel crashes, drops calls, is clunky. The ACD monitoring software (Cinphony) REQUIRES that it be run on an IIS server as 'Administrator' rather then the Internet account. When questioned the company said "yeah don't put that server on the outside of your firewall". I said what?! That's not acceptable, you can't run an application as 'administrator'. They said 'well that is how it runs, sorry'.

    Problem is, once you have a large system like that put in for a call center, you can't exactly "just return it". We spent the good part of 2 years fighting the company that put in the Nortel and Cintech (Makers of Cinphony) to get it to work right. To this day it only transfers a call out of a queue to a land-line when it feels like it.

    Oh and don't even get me started about "The routing resources needed for this call are not available" if you have a transfer to an external number from one of the menu trees on the Nortel.... apparently you can only have 1 outbound transfer from a CCR tree?!?!

    This is why I hate proprietary software.... it doesn't work, and they don't support it!