IBM may be working on a massive 80,000-user System i IP Telephony deal. IBM and 3Com have previously said that a joint solution would be aimed at small-to-midsized businesses, but this potential accord would blow that statement out of the water and set a whole new standard for IP telephony solutions.

I originally heard about the plan through an IBM Business Partner who didn't have all the details and had heard about it second hand. A couple of queries to IBM led to dead ends, but when I spoke to Chip Mclelland, IBM's System i senior product marketing manager, last week about IBM's latest VoIP and collaboration news, I remembered the rumor. Here's what McClelland had to say:

"I don't want to confirm or deny that we're going after. . . . When you start talking about that stuff, how many 80,000-employee companies are out there, right? Let me put it this way: We don't talk about deals we haven't won that are in process, and some of these deals, particularly ones with very large companies, have very long lead times because the customer wants a lot of validation of tests and demos. . . . This solution from 3Com is a very scalable solution. It can easily scale up into the hundred-thousand-handset range and you can easily put two, three, four systems that very well work together and basically reach whichever size company you want to reach.

"Couple that with the scalability of System i, which scales from one-way processors to our monster 64-way 595s that are bigger than the largest mainframe, and you've got a pretty compelling story here for scalabiilty. In fact, there isn't really anything like it in the IP telephony space because all the others scale horizontally. So when you get up into big customers, you're looking at managing a server farm of potentially hundreds of servers. If those servers happen to be running an operating system environment such as, say, Windows, you could spend a lot of time patching, updating, and maintainng those systems. Not only that, think about the traffic this distributed system is going to create across your network. Where all these different systems are talking to one another, there's a lot of communication going on between the systems. In the System i you can manage a very small number of instances and leverage virtual Ethernet, for example, to keep a lot of the traffic on the network inside the system. You're not going to create a whole other area of network and management complexity within a large environment.

"Without confirming or denying any particular opportunity, I would paint a rosy picture for our ability to go after large deals and take advantage of the scalability of the System i and the 3Com platform. Obviously, since we only launched in November, this sort of deal would take a while longer to mature."

Cool stuff, eh?