Siemens’ CCO Hummel Confronts the Challenges of Unified Communications

AUSTIN, TEXAS – In his ITEXPO keynote address, Chris Hummel, chief commercial officer of Siemens Enterprise Communications, talked about the difficulties of addressing issues regarding unified communications (UC).

“For whatever reason, it’s really hard,” Hummel said of the fast-paced communications milieu and the needs of businesses for entertaining and productive integrated solutions. He announced that, despite the challenges, Siemens is committed to providing businesses with flawless and engaging user experience in integrated communications.

He also went on to say that UC may have failed to deliver, but there is definitely a potential to it. And in that potential lies something promising – promising enough for future advancement in mobile workforce systems. He stressed that Siemens finds the UC-related challenges formidable, and the consumer is not helping in furthering Siemens’ cause.

UC is intended to unify all integrated communication channels without sacrificing user experience. Aside from enabling a mobile workforce for many business processes, unified communications will promote efficiency, savings, productivity, and collaboration between workers. 

The difficulty of getting unified communications off the ground stems from the fact that many UC components have been separately developed. In addition, a large chunk of the money in the UC industry is derived from discretely marketing the different components then grouping them into offerings which have considerable interoperability and integration shortcomings.

Siemens’ CCO further explained that there are four compounding factors that lead to an unmet demand for unified communications. One, much of the work is distributed and mobile. For instance, in Siemens, 80 percent of the company’s staff work 30 miles away from the main office. Two, consumer devices are used more often, thus putting pressure on IP businesses and manufacturers to keep up with the increasing demand. Three, users demand communications solutions that are fun to use. Hummel underscored the latter as “joy of use is an expectation.” And four, conversations are simply plain conversations that take place globally and multi-modally.

Hummel also brought up the history of the communications industry. There was a time when building a large number of ports or phone lines by telcos was given top priority until the Ethernet port of IT successfully held sway.

“We have to provide mobility as the norm, not a mobility adjunct,” Hummel said in his discussion of what he rightly termed as an “anywhere worker.”

Siemens replaces chips from its desktop devices with mobile chips. If mobility becomes the ultimate norm, then it creates an interconnected work environment and enjoyable user experience across all communication channels – the tablet, the smartphone, and the desktop phone.

Once mobility is accepted as the default work environment, the next step is to unify the communications platform where all services – smartphone, Windows, iOS, and tablet – interact without compatibility issues.

Furthermore, Siemens concentrates on letting users and businesses work flexibly with tools and embed such tools in existing work applications.

In his closing statement, Hummel noted: “Watch this space, because I feel like this is where the industry has to go.” (KOM) Link. Link.