Siemens Communications – They’re Not Dead Yet
Siemens Communications – They’re Not Dead Yet by Blair Pleasant
Another week, another analyst conference. This time it was the Siemens Contact Center Business Group. As you may know, as of October 1 2006, Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co. KG will become an independent company, wholly owned by Siemens AG. While it’s still purely speculation as to what will become of Siemens Com, the Siemens Com folks are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs as they wait for a savior. Instead, they are busy making plans, developing new products, devising new strategies, and even implementing a new software design methodology. Of course all of these bold new ideas may prove to be totally moot, depending on who acquires the company. But I have to say that I’m impressed with most of what I heard and saw at the analyst briefing.
According to Senior VP Mark Straton, Siemens is taking the offensive, and is working on aggressive migration and attack programs, especially for the HiPath 8000. Siemens is launching a new strategy centering on Open Communications as the core theme, which follows its Lifeworks philosophy, noting that their products are open and can work with any device, IT environment, and network.
Siemens is focusing on “OpenPath” – a transition path to open unified communications and the Siemens Lifeworks vision. OpenPath is Open IT based- communications, including new and existing products ranging from a Siemens peer-to-peer product at the low end, an all-in-one product for the mid market, and a virtualized system running out of the data center at the high end. Deployment options are open as well, including hosted, owned, managed, etc. Siemens highlighted the fact that products like OpenScape can operate on any phone and IT environment. While other vendors give lip service to this notion, Siemens is actually doing it.
While Siemens’ vision and new products certainly seem impressive, it’s too soon to say what impact this will have on the market. Depending on who eventually acquires or partners with Siemens, all of this work could be for naught. If a competitor like Avaya is the acquirer (which I sincerely hope is not the case), it’s likely that Siemens’ new products and strategy will never see the light of day. If, however, the acquirer or partner is an application or business process provider (which I’m hoping is the case), then Siemens’ products would add value to and communication-enable those applications, and Siemens would most likely be able to continue its development and product plans.
SOA was a hot topic at the conference, and Siemens seems to be further along the SOA development curve than most of the other vendors I’ve spoken with. Last May Siemens announced that it is “Exposing key HiPath enterprise communication functions to developers for business process integrations,” and in August announced “Siemens Communications Expands Features, SOA Components and Market Range of its HiPath 8000 Open Unified Communications Systems.” Based on SOA, Siemens’ has a “component-based business process workflow orientation,” and is developing universal graphical-based interface tools for workflow and business services deployment, focusing on the consolidation of information and interfaces across multiple applications. There is much more to Siemens’ SOA efforts, but it will have to wait for another blog.
Siemens also discussed its new software development process, Agile software development, which (according to Wikipedia) is “a conceptual framework for undertaking software engineering projects. There are a number of agile software development methods, such as those espoused by The Agile Alliance.” According to the Agile Alliance’s “Manifesto,” Agile software development values:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
Siemens has been migrating to this new type of software development over the past couple years, and the fruits of its labors are beginning to show, with faster development times and greater flexibility.
This is truly evidence of the beginning of a new Siemens that we’re seeing. While in some ways the company is still stuck in its roots and heritage, what I saw last week showed that Siemens is certainly trying to move ahead and is reinventing itself as an open, agile, and flexible company. As I said, I liked what I heard. But we still have to wait and see if Siemens’ vision will come to light, or if it will be buried inside another switch vendor’s operations.