IBM Business Partner Case Study
Industry: Telecommunications
IBM and 3Com integrate IP telephony with core
business process applications to reduce costs at
Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising
As worker mobility increases and
travel budgets tighten, effective
communications among business
colleagues can be challenging. For
that reason, comprehensive and
integrated collaboration tools become
increasingly important.
However, users can become frustrated
with juggling multiple devices to handle
phone, fax, email, instant messaging
and Web-based communications.
That was the challenge for the Fashion
Institute of Design and Merchandising
(FIDM), a specialized, California-based
private college with four campuses
and seven satellite locations. The
school has nearly 6,000 full-time
students, 1,000 staff and faculty
members, more than 30,000 graduates
and rolling admissions with new
classes beginning each quarter.
FIDM needed to substantially reduce
telephone costs and implement a
voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP)
and unified messaging solution
that would help take the school into
the future.
So, the institute turned to IBM and
IBM Business Partner 3Com to help
replace its legacy private branch
exchange (PBX) telephone system
and achieve two key objectives -
minimize the number of servers
required to run IP telephony and
integrate its collaboration software
applications – IBM Lotus Notes and
Sametime – with IP telephony.
3Com, a leading supplier of
IBM Business Partner:
3Com
3Com is a leading supplier of
secure, converged voice and
data networking. Located in
more than 40 countries, 3Com
is headquartered in
Marlborough, Massachusetts.
secure, converged voice and data
networks, has a long background
in IP telephony, having shipped the
first IP PBX in 1998.
“The IBM and 3Com
solution has proved
itself as a reliable,
secure platform to
run FIDM business.”
Roxanne Reynolds-Lair,
chief information officer,
Fashion Institute of Design
and Merchandising
A unique solution LPAR is a system architecture

IBM and 3Com worked with FIDM approach that enables a corporate IT

to install the IBM System i™ for IP

“The integration infrastructure the capability to virtualize

Telephony Solution. The solution hardware resources that can be shared

between IBM System i,
includes a carrier grade softswitch by multiple independent operating

developed by 3Com. The solution

the IBM software and environments. It allows the division of

runs on a single LINUX® on a single server into several completely

3Com fully realizes the
POWER™ partition on the IBM independent virtual servers or logical

System i platform, which includes

long-held promise of partitions.

the IBM OS/400® operating system IP telephony and

and IBM DB2® Universal Database®. Besides two LINUX partitions running
enables organizations on the newly installed telephony

Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, FIDM chief solution at the institute, the LPARS

of all sizes to benefit . . .”
information officer, said that since its run the following independent operating
Edgar Masri,
implementation, FIDM has saved over president and environments: IBM Lotus® Domino;

50 percent on its monthly costs, about chief executive officer, IBM WebSphere® Application Server
3Com for portal enablement; production,
several thousand dollars a month.
It also is saving 70 percent in local testing and development; e-commerce;

trunking costs to PRI (primary rate and the telephony, messaging and IP

interface). And, the institute simplified conferencing applications.

its infrastructure with an all-in-one

business computing platform and is
able to respond to business recovery
situations faster. Further, it now has a
foundation for FIDM growth over the
next decade, with an expected return
on the initial investment in two years.

For FIDM, moving from a traditional

phone environment to integrated
VoIP meant replacing costly
asynchronous transfer mode (ATM)
lines with cost-effective multi-protocol
label switching (MPLS) ones. The
FIDM network equipment was updated
to support this implementation. Six
PBXs were replaced with System i
IP Telephony Call Control,
Messaging and Conferencing voice
applications running on the existing
IBM System i570 12-way with nine
dynamic logical partitions (LPARs).
With this solution, FIDM was able to run
its IP telephony applications on
the same System i server that hosted
Lotus Notes® and Sametime®, avoiding
the need to invest in racks of Intel
processor-based servers which would
have been required by other solutions
to deliver the same level of availability.
Sametime integration enabled FIDM
to take advantage of such IP telephony
features as “click-to-call” and
“click-to-conference.”

From within the Samteime client, users

can see “presence” information from
within the Sametime client and Web
interface, and use “click-to-call”
(clicking on a telephone icon) from
within Lotus Notes to “phone” another
person on Sametime.

Edgar Masri, president and chief

executive officer of 3Com, said the
integration of IP telephony features into
Notes and Sametime clients, helps to
differentiate System i for IP telephony
from other solutions on the market.
“Until now, integration between IP
telephony and collaboration applications,
such as IBM Lotus Notes and Sametime,
required expensive custom integration,
which made it available only to the
largest of enterprises. Now it is available
economically to everyone,“ he said.
Other benefits to FIDM of System i
for IP Telephony’s native SIP support
include avoiding the need for costly SIP
conversion licenses required by other
proprietary IP telephony solutions to
support SIP, as well as the capability
to integrate IP telephony with other
core business process applications and
hardware. “The ability to expand the
system by adding SIP-compliant
components provides us with vertical market capabilities, expand
tremendous flexibility,” Masri said. their partner network and attract
customers in the markets they serve. It
Real-time benefits is “optimized” in the telecommunications
industry, which means it has developed
“The IBM and 3Com solution has
further specialization by optimizing its
proved itself as a reliable, secure
applications with IBM technologies,
platform to run FIDM business. We were
achieving success with its own solutions
evaluating IP telephony offerings from
and other criteria data networks.
other companies, but when we heard
about the new System i IP for
“When IBM and 3Com joined forces to
Telephony solution, we couldn’t pass it
blend IP telephony with the System i
up because of the confidence we had in
and its leading IBM software applications
IBM and any partner they would pick in
(Lotus Notes and Sametime), the
the telephony arena,” said Reynolds-Lair.
partnership was founded on the
companies’ common values of
3Com, a Premier IBM Business
integration, ease-of-use, reliability,
Partner, participates in IBM
scalability, security and support of
PartnerWorld® Industry Networks,
open standards, “ Masri said. “The
which offers a rich set of benefits to
integration between IBM System i, the
all IBM PartnerWorld members who
IBM software and 3Com fully realizes the
want to team with IBM to build their
long-held promise of IP telephony and
enables organizations of all sizes to
benefit from the cost-savings, advanced
features and productivity-enhancing
applications IP telephony has to offer,
all on a proven platform. “
For more information
Please contact your IBM sales
representative or IBM Business Partner.
Or you can visit us at: ibm.com
For more information about ISV
resources from IBM PartnerWorld, visit:
ibm.com/partnerworld/industrynetworks
To learn more about 3Com, visit
3com.com
To learn more about the Fashion Institute
of Design and Merchandising, visit
fidm.edu
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