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ROLM originally made flight computers for the military. Later, they branched into the telecom industry by designing the CBX. Even though it was the second digital switch on the market, it quickly outsold AT&T and became #2 behind the Nortel SL-1 switch. At one point, ROLM was poised to overtake Nortel as the leader in PBX sales in the US.
In 1984 IBM partnered with (and later acquired) ROLM Communications in Santa Clara. ROLM started to lose pace with Nortel due to product issues and they never recovered. The 9751 CBX, which has IBM's name on it, was a great product but when ISDN service became more affordable, IBM never really updated the 9751 to integrate correctly with ISDN. Nortel leaped ahead on that issue alone; Avaya and others gained ground and started to overtake ROLM. IBM's ROLM division was later half sold to Siemens AG in 1990. By 1993, Siemens bought out IBM's share in ROLM and the downturn continued. The ROLM name was eventually dropped in the late 1990s.
Currently, the Siemens Resale Services Group offers support for ROLM phone systems, including repair services for broken classic and later RISC ROLM phones and sales of refurbished units, as do many other secondary vendors. Many ROLMphones are still in use in large scale universities, institutions and some corporations (Entergy, Huntsman, the Arkla side of CenterPoint Energy, NASA, the Santa Fe side of BNSF railroad, etc.), which were large scale ROLM users from the early days and are still known for being very reliable, though Siemens no longer makes any updates or new models of the CBX and eventually will discontinue support by 2010.
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