Siemens OpenScape Accelerates Business Responsiveness and Productivity for Enterprises with IBM Lotus Sametime

BOCA RATON, Fla. --(Business Wire)-- Siemens Communications, Inc. today announced it is making its market-leading Unified Communications application suite, OpenScape, available for use with IBM Lotus Sametime. Siemens expects to be finalizing early customer beta candidates Q1 2007 for implementations in Q2 2007 and is targeting general availability of the application suite for Q4. OpenScape brings advanced collaboration features, such as click-to-contact, click-to-conference, and full-spectrum presence functionality to knowledge workers using the popular IBM platform. When integrated with IBM Lotus Sametime unified communications capabilities, users can experience the full power of advanced unified communications, thereby increasing productivity. By extending the Sametime user experience, user adoption hurdles and the learning curve for the new application features are greatly reduced, enabling organizations to quickly realize the proven gains from communications-enabled business processes. Furthermore, these capabilities will also help companies realize enhanced value from a service-oriented architecture (SOA) strategy that includes collaboration and unified communications.

Cost containment for communications vendors and their carrier customers can be achieved on two fronts.

"In order to succeed in the information age, companies need to make internal and external communications as seamless as possible," said Jonathan B. Spira, CEO and chief analyst at Basex, a knowledge economy research firm. "Solutions such as OpenScape allow knowledge workers to tap into a company's most important resource, its people, through the fastest and most convenient means."

The solution streamlines communications, reducing bottlenecks and delays that can occur due to multiple fragmented systems for voice, data, wireless, and mobility commonly found in most enterprises. Integration with Lotus Sametime will provide users with presence information about a contact's availability, before they communicate, enabling them to choose the best method and time to communicate effectively on the first attempt. Enterprises using Siemens OpenScape benefit from a more collaborative and productive workplace, where employees spend less time sorting through e-mail and responding to duplicate messages, and more time on productive work. Unique, new features expected to be made available with the release include Device Handover from one defined end point to another and auto-connect enhancements to the tell-me-when feature, among others.

Siemens OpenScape gives users a point of centralized control over all their communications assets - PC, office phone, cell phone, PDA, home phone, instant messaging, email, voicemail, audio/video/web conferencing - making these tools both simple to use and effective in supporting business objectives. Project workers reach each other the first time, every time. Researchers can quickly find and share information in real-time. Sales and marketing teams are much more responsive to customers.

Open Communications Framework

Built on Siemens' unified SOA applications framework, OpenScape is a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based application suite that provides uniform, ubiquitous access to devices, features, and capabilities in a Unified Communications network. To facilitate tight integration into process-oriented applications, OpenScape offers open SOA-based Web Services developer tools that businesses can leverage to incorporate real-time, presence-based communication features into the processes that will benefit most from improved responsiveness, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Moreover, because it is open and standards-based, customers with a multi-vendor PBX or application environment can realize an immediate improvement. Siemens SOA provides an open unified framework of common services and functionality for all Siemens enterprise applications.

"OpenScape provides the most open, complete, and flexible Unified Communications solutions in the world," said Eve Aretakis, CEO, Siemens Communications, Inc. "Our customers gain a competitive edge from its easy integration with key business processes and systems, its rich feature set that can be deeply embedded in the applications, IT and telephony environments, and its ability to support multiple deployment models and access modes."

Deployment of the Siemens HiPath 8000 platform, a native SIP-based real-time IP system for enterprise-class communications, provides additional performance benefits and enhanced capabilities for Siemens OpenScape users.