Polar Beverages Inc. in Worcester, Mass., has been beta-testing the system for about 10 users for a few days and will expand its deployment to 40 users in a month and then to 400 employees in February, said Paul Paciello, director of IT for the family-owned beverage business.

The IBM System i IP Telephony system uses IBM System i with 3Com's VCX software, the companies said. On a single server box, Polar is running its ERP system, e-mail and WebSphere applications on three separate OS/400 partitions as well as three Linux operating system partitions. On the three Linux partitions, Polar is running one primary 3Com VCX, a secondary VCX and a file-sharing application, Paciello said.

Physically, the System i fits on a single rack in Polar's data center, which amounts to two Intel-based servers and a box for the Hosted Management Console used to manage System i, Paciello said. "It's amazing how much computing they can put in these small physical spaces," he said. "About 95 percent of our business runs off a single System i."

Paciello said the beta incurred a few problems and required changes to the company's network so that Cisco Systems Inc. routers could handle voice traffic.

In typical VOIP deployments, customers find they need multiple server boxes, one for each function in VOIP, such as messaging or conference-calling. But the combined IBM and 3Com initiative reduces the hardware to one system, IBM and 3Com officials said.