Basically, in my mind, IBM has been notable absent from the VoIP space, which is why it was worth blogging twice.
Well, here is an excellent read about IBM's VoIP plans. According to this article, it appears that right now IBM in Australia & New Zealand is focusing on bringing VoIP to their 40,000 Australian & New Zealand employees.
IBM is very high on "SIP" and sees SIP as the means to enable their large mobile workforce to be more productive via presence, follow-me, and other SIP-based functionality. But according to this article they have projects within the healthcare industry (voice over WiFi) that is doing well and I can certainly foresee IBM offering VoIP solutions for the call center industry as well.
]]>A while back there was a big splash made by IBM when they said they were going to install Linux Telephony in all of their offices or basically Linux based VoIP.
Lately I haven’t heard anything else about this initiative. I heard a rumor that the equipment providers went ballistic when they heard that Avaya was going to move forward with this plan and subsequently threatened to stop buying IBM equipment. This in turn caused IBM to scrap the plans.
I don’t know if this is the case but it does seem to be an abrupt pull-out of a market to me.