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March 07, 2008
A Closer Look at Siemens New OpenScape Unified Communications Server
By Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communications Group
Siemens Communications, recently announced a huge step forward in its ongoing transformation into a software-oriented company with the launch of a remarkable, innovative unified communications software platform, OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) Server which supports a comprehensive suite of UC applications that initially includes the OpenScape Voice Application (HiPath 8000 V3.1 R2, enterprise grade voice and IP Least Cost Routing), OpenScape Video (integrated HD, desktop and client video conferencing) and OpenScape UC Application V3 (role-based UC).
I recently had a lengthy, in-depth discussion about what Siemens has done with the following Siemens people:
Alina Urdaneta, vice president of Marketing, North America; Graham Howard, director, Global Marketing, Large Systems at Siemens Communications; Wayne Seifried, director, Global Portfolio Marketing, Enterprise Mobility and Video Solutions.
Alina Urdaneta says: “We’re the Number 2 vendor worldwide in enterprise communications. We cater to about 70 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. We’re a $400 billion company and we ourselves as having a pioneering vision and leadership concerning open unified communications. UC is our core business and, from our point of view, we see it as a software play and an open standards play that we see transforming communications in the workplace in a very profound way, even more so than simply Voice-over-IP [VoIP]. That’s because VoIP is a foundational transport protocol and we see that as an intermediate step toward achieving the ‘end game’ which is the sophisticated communications environment afforded by unified communications.”
“So, our announcement involves our OpenScape Unified Communications Server,” says Urdaneta. “If you have followed Siemens during the past 18 months, you’ve seen that we have been working very hard towards a transformation to a software and services business. This has been implemented on several fronts. We have a really grass-roots skills transformation initiative within the company. We’re hiring people with these skills as well. And we’ve ‘beefed up’ and redeployed our global services infrastructure to support this new environment.
“This announcement in particular is about our product portfolio becoming an applications software portfolio, which of course underpins this transformation we’re talking about,” says Urdaneta.
“The Unified Communications Server is the foundation of all of our unified communications applications,” says Urdaneta. “And along with the announcement of the OpenScape Unified Communications Server, we are also announcing new versions of the applications that make up the OpenScape Unified Communications Suite. For example, our OpenScape Voice Application is our HiPath 8000 Version 3.1, which, over time, we will re-brand as OpenScape Voice, because in this new environment, Voice is an application served up from a datacenter.”
“We’re also announcing OpenScape Unified Communications Applications Version 3.0,” says Urdaneta, “and we’re also announcing a brand-new OpenScape Video Portolio, which we’ll get to in a moment.”
“Accompanying our announcement are a number of compelling marketing packages that entail voice and UC and upgrades in a step-wise fashion with very compelling prices,” says Urdaneta.
“In essence, we see that UC hasn’t really taken off, and there are several reasons for this,” says Urdaneta. “First of all, there’s the lack of understanding of what UC is and identifying the quantifiable benefits it provides to an enterprise from an individual and group standpoint. Also, there are the perceived complexities of implementing the technology. Most vendors have tried to approach unified communications as a ‘bolt-on’ capability for their IP PBXs. But that limits your capabilities and remains mostly a proprietary solution. Siemens approaches the matter as a very open software-based and SIP-based communications environment that is independent of whatever IT or telephony system you have. It truly takes things to a level of simplicity that every customer can deploy within their environment. And, quite frankly, what we see is that now Microsoft (News - Alert) and IBM have expressed their decision to enter into the businesses of enterprise telephony and unified communications, we are very sure that these will take off in a very big way. We’re defining the market of the future in enterprise communications.
“Fortunately for us at Siemens, we’ve been working for the last ten years on these products and OpenScape is a very mature product today,” says Urdaneta. “We’re at Version 3, having launched the product in 2003. So we have the ‘proof points’ and we have the technology to make all of this a reality today.”
Why Unified Communications Now from Siemens?
“Unified communications makes employees more productive,” says Urdaneta. “You can automate communications into workflows, you can integrate with enterprise applications that people use every day, such as Salesforce.com. We just accomplished that with Accenture. We’ve integrated with SAP (News - Alert) NetWeaver and with Siebold to support a faster-time-to-market in medical and pharmaceutical trials. We’ve done an integration with IBM’s Lotus Sametime, too. It’s all about improving the business processes and closing business transactions faster, and so forth.
“Why should customers be interested in UC now?” asks Urdaneta “The value proposition is now clearly there. Organizations can be more competitive, they can save money, they can increase customer satisfaction, be more productive and increase their top-line.”
Urdaneta continues: “Interestingly, what we see being unique about Siemens is that we’ve approached the matter from the angle of being a very open platform. Open technologies, open architectures, open standards – that’s what we’re all about. XML, Services-Oriented Architectures [SOAs] and SIP are all the protocols of Fixed-Mobile Convergence [FMC]. If you look, for example, at UMTS wireless networks, or 4G mobile networks, they’re all built around SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol (News - Alert). Thus, integration of the IT environment and the fixed and mobile domains are going to be possible over common and standard protocols.
“On the other hand, open integration, as we know, delivers business value and open architecture allows for multi-vendor environments,” says Urdaneta, “so that’s were we see the value. On top of that, our solution is massively scalable, because telephony functionality is delivered from the data center, where voice is a mission-critical application, but an application nonetheless, one that is license-based and software-based. And because Siemens built this platform from its carrier sister technology, it offers carrier-grade reliability and redundancy that we need in the business communications environment.”
The Message
“How we see the future of enterprise communications shaped the strategy that led us to develop the OpenScape Unified Communications Server,” says Urdaneta. “We feel that Voice is really the most important business communication medium. If you look at the work that Microsoft is doing, they’re building a platform from the instant messaging perspective. We, however, really believe that Voice is the most natural and pervasive form of communications. We have experience in this and we believe that this needs to be the foundation of UC.”
“On the other hand, we believe that large enterprise communications will be software-based,” says Urdaneta. “With our HiPath 8000 application, that’s exactly how it works – it’s licensed-based and delivered from your data center.”
“Also, unlike Microsoft, we think that single-vendor enterprise unified communications applications and solutions are not realistic,” says Urdaneta. “The world is very heterogeneous and that’s the reality. Customers want to make the most out of their investment and this is exactly what we do.”
“We think that the real value of the unified communications is the ability to integrate within business processes and lower TCO [Total Cost of Ownership], increase productivity, and we do have multi-vendor services capabilities that are required to integrate this kind of environment,” says Urdaneta.
There are many central services that the OpenScape Unified Communications Server will provide. First of all, there’s SIP session control for all the media. In the past, this was called ‘call control’ in the voice world, but now we have to deal with voice, instant messaging, video, and so forth. So this is the transaction of session control capability. It also offers federated presence, even when you go outside the walls of the enterprise.
Another very important capability is the Quality of Service management, to manage and give priority to real-time traffic on the network. This is critical, and achieving it is not trivial. We have very sophisticated tools to accomplish this.
We also have Session Detail Recording, which in the past was called Call Detail Recording. It’s gone beyond call detail recoding to include instant messaging, emails, conference calls and whatever media you’re using to communicate, along with the ability to record these things at will.
We also have a common management portal, as well as common licensing. There’s also availability management, which means we have carrier-class scalability for the Voice product.
On top of all that you now have all of the different applications: OpenScape Voice, which, as I said, is our HiPath 8000 that we’re rebranding over time to OpenScape Voice. Then there’s OpenScape Video which we’re about to describe. And there’s OpenScape Messaging, the OpenScape Unified Communications Application and OpenScape Mobility that gives you the ability to travel from your mobile to your fixed device. Also joining these applications is One-Number Service, the OpenScape Contact Center application, and more.
Finally, we have the OpenScale Integration Services capability. OpenScale is our services brand. With this we can provide integration with products from Microsoft and IBM (News - Alert) ecosystems, as well as the ability to integrate with other business applications through our open technology capabilities. This is how we integrate with applications, and it also has a very strong security capability. And it works with any client any IP or IP telephony infrastructure, or virtually any environment, whether it’s legacy, convergence, an IP PBX that’s a hybrid model, or a modern softswitch.
Graham Howard, director says: “Yes, we’ve done a major overhaul. For example, we can deliver an voice application just like the HiPath 8000 is delivered today. We will deliver the OpenScape voice application running on the Unified Communications server, or we can deliver the OpenScape UC application running on the UC Server. But one of the great things about it is that they can both run on the same server at the same time. So now users can have more than one of these applications simultaneously running and they can work together seamlessly. Naturally, we have a common management interface as well, so that now if you’ve got a voice user, UC user or mobility user, you can manage everything through a single portal.”
“Moreover, you add the licenses one user at a time,” says Howard. “So if you want to add one voice user or three UC users and then another 25 voice users, you can do that. We have that fine a level of granularity – system growth in units of one.”
“Many people build their systems and believe they need to sell x number of licenses in batches,” says Howard. “They tend to come in large ‘lumps’. But life isn’t like that for most people. We’ve all read the reports that say about 20 percent of the current workforce really needs UC and perhaps the rest don’t. So why would you build a system which has 100 percent of everything and that’s compulsory? Instead, we’ve provided maximum flexibility for our customers with this system. That includes migration as well. That’s a very important point, because it allows you to keep pockets of people on legacy systems if they are perfectly content with the existing functionality. But if you have a group of mobile users, you can activate or ‘turn them on’ on the OpenScape Unified Communications Server, and have them add the functionality that they need, whether it’s One Number Service, Mobility, Conferencing and Collaboration, or whatever, while still being tied to the legacy system.”
Three Editions
Siemens OpenScape Unified Communications Server has edition packaging for specific target markets.
“We have three distinct editions for three different markets,” says Alina Urdaneta, “The Medium Edition [ME] is for organizations having less than 1,000 users. That consists of one hardware server with option voice redundancy. The Large Edition [LE] supports up to 100,000 voice and basic UC users, and up to 20,000 advanced UC users in a multiple server configuration, also with redundancy as an option. Finally, the Hosted Edition [HE] which is very similar to the Large Edition, provides additional capabilities to support multi-tenant billing and things of that nature for those entities, whether ASPs or ISPs, that decide to provide communications as a server.
What’s New And Exciting
Graham Howard picks up with: “Our new OpenScape Voice Application is based on the HiPath 8000 that everybody knows and loves, and which is doing incredibly well in the market these days. Much of the functionality that people know and love in the HiPath 8000, such as the SIP Session Controller, has now been embedded into the UC Server functionality. We have the complete range of enterprise voice applications. It has a really good IP Least Cost Routing [LCR] capability, so, for example, we can seed this into networks where perhaps people have got a range of existing IP PBXs or PBXs, and we can put in this application as a LCR function, connecting things together, but of course they can run other things on that same server. You could have UC users and then they can be scattered about the network. Why would you scatter them around? Well, most teams these days consist of people who don’t all work together in a single physical location. It’s like our conference call today – I’m in Munich in my apartment, Alina Urdaneta is Reston, Virginia, and Wayne Seifried in Canada and you’re in New Jersey. We now take things like that for granted.”
“In any case, we’ve enhanced much of our functionality,” says Howard. “The quality of service, for example, and the call admission control have been enhanced for multimedia. That’s really important because you can start a call as a voice call, you can move it and transform it into a video call, you can then do some collaboration regarding something like a document, and so the quality of service requirements may change during the course of the call. Part of our enhancements involve monitoring, so we know exactly how much bandwidth is available. That ability can be really useful for planning purposes.”
“We previously mentioned the system’s reliability,” says Howard. “Many of our big customers are the large banks. This is because they see the extreme reliability of our systems. It’s a data center service for they all have dual data centers. So you actually put the two parts of a dual-node HiPath 8000 in different data centers in different cities. These two nodes are constantly in touch with each other. As long as the packet round-trip delay is less than 100 milliseconds, the system is fine. And you can go a long way across a continent at the speed of light in a 100 millisecond round trip. So, both databases are constantly synchronized; even if there’s a disaster, and you have a fire in the building or in the data center, the other site can take over immediately. You don’t lose a single call in progress, and you don’t lose a single billing record, even when major problems occur such as losing an entire data center.”
“As for our Hosted Edition, we’ve got some large customers that are managed services providers or are doing hosted services,” says Howard. “Global Crossing is a great example. They’ve been using HiPath 8000 – and now OpenScape Voice – for hosting services for a large chunk of the U.K. government. Their initial system will grow to 100,000 users. So again, they have dual data centers. But they have a few other interesting things too. With everybody doing UC these days, even if people are using soft clients, companies still have to do legal intercept if necessary. That’s true even if people are using encryption. And, of course, we’ve included encryption in our UC capabilities, but we obviously still have to be to do the legal intercept of calls, even they’re running off soft clients on a mobile device on one side and its communicating with a hard phone on the other side of the world. We’ve actually done that. Our latest version of the Voice Application is capable of legal intercept, even for secure UC calls.
“We also expanded a number of features for the managed services providers,” says Howard. “One of the important items is that we expose this functionality for integration using Web Services, so that people can now take this functionality and embed it into the back office processes, as Alina Urdaneta was describing a moment ago.”
“We’ve updated the OpenScape product – now it’s the OpenScape UC Application,” says Howard. “We’re rewritten chunks of the code, so a lot of it is new. Again, it’s a new licensable application running on the OpenScape UC server. There are several things where are new about this. The soft client for this can be what looks like a soft phone on a screen, or it can be a simple toolbar that you can have across the top of your screen, or you can click into an application. We also have a web client which looks similar to the soft phone, but it uses a web interface instead of a soft client interface. The soft client, by the way, can run on mobile devices too.”
“We also now have available a new, modular, role-based UC application with a number of different clients,” says Howard. “You’ve got clients for everything from personal productivity at one end, right through to Team Edition at the other, which is widely-distributed teams involved with a lot of conferencing and collaboration, and so we’ve built in team presence and so forth. So you have a number of different clients.”
“We’ve improved other features – not just the user interface,” says Howard. “We’ve added concierge conferencing, Fixed-Mobile Convergence [FMC] device handover, and importantly when Wayne Seifried, talks in a moment about video, you’ve got integrated video capabilities in the product. So now in the client you can click and change a call from a voice call to a video call, and the video call will now actually interwork with other parts of our video portfolio, including high-definition, room-based conferencing systems. So you now get an end-to-end user experience whether you’re using a soft client, a desk user, or whether you in a main conference room. It’s all built on SOA (System Oriented Architecture).
OpenScape UC Application Roles-Based Packaging
“There’s a range of different clients,” says Howard. “It goes from a Personal Edition [trial & full] for $73 to an “essential” Enterprise Edition for $160, to a ‘Professional’ Edition for $189 all the way through to the Enterprise Edition for teams, for $202.”
The less expensive editions offer basic UC, soft client telephony, and basic mobility,” says Howard. “More expensive editions add to that, with advanced mobility and messaging, conferencing and collaboration, and finally high-end Multimedia collaboration and integration.”
“One of the important things that comes out of this,” says Howard, “is that these editions I’ve described are for 10 users with incremental prices. It’s a ‘buy’ price. It’s not a rental per user per year. And, as I’ve said, you can add one user at a time to the system.”
Alina Urdaneta adds, “There are a few other things which make Siemens unique. You may recall that OpenScape, in its first version, worked on Microsoft Live Communications Server [LCS]. In September of 2007, we announced our integration with IBM Lotus Sametime. They are taking parts of our SOA on OpenScape and are embedding them into their Lotus Sametime, and they’re rebranding it the Lotus Sametime Telephony Product. With it, you have click-to-dial, click-to-conference, presence capabilities, and all that in Lotus Sametime is provided by OpenScape.”
“And now in this latest version,” says Urdaneta, “it’s independent of IBM and Microsoft as well. There’s an additional level of independence from the system on which the software is working.”
“Every vendor has a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to unified communications,” says Urdaneta. “But we think that there are a number of users within any enterprise that will just need a telephone and basic unified communications. For example, an engineer who has his head down drawings or writing code. A person such as that will need unified messaging, a voice portal, a soft client so they can work from home or remotely occasionally, but they don’t need a complete range of capabilities. Salespeople need a certain subset of what a system can do, since they’re ‘road warriors’, and they need One Number Service and maybe Rules-Based Routing, so their customers or their boss can reach them. Finally, there are people such as those in marketing, such as ourselves. I sit here in Reston Virginia, and the sits in Boca Raton, and half the time he’s in Europe. We have a 50-person organization, and we’re all scattered throughout the U.S., and yet we have a very collaborative workflow. So this is the type of user that will need the Professional Edition or even more than that, the Team Edition, which is the one that you can integrate and provides the capabilities to integrate with other third-party applications that everybody knows, loves, and uses.”
“We have thus created our packaging based on the user profiles,” says Urdaneta. “You can go from one edition to the other, adopting each in a step-wise upgrade or migration approach.”
The New Siemens OpenScape Video Portfolio
Wayne Seifried, director of Global Portfolio Marketing, Enterprise Mobility and Video Solutions at Siemens Communications, says, “Our new video product line is called OpenScape Video. It’s Siemens’ entry into the high-definition videoconferencing market. We’re offering two room-based systems, VHD600 and VHD400 and one Executive Desktop system, the OpenScape Video VHD100. What’s unique is that not only are these leading-edge, HD-capable systems, with some unique features that will differentiate them in the marketplace from competitors’ high-def solutions, but we’ve taken video a step further by integrating these products with the use of the Unified Communications Server into OpenScape Voice and into the OpenScape UC Application.”
“In other words,” says Seifried, “you now get a complete, unified, conferencing experience. You can have participants dial in from an HD-enabled conference room, an Executive Desktop can dial in using HD, you can have individuals come into the conference from their PC soft client, as Graham mentioned previously. Indeed, you can individuals coming in only with a voice client, which would be a voice SIP device, be it their desktop phone or some device they’re using on the road. In short, all of these participants can utilize the capabilities of the Unified Communications Server to reach the videoconference room using a common numbering plan through SIP, thus fundamentally making videoconferencing as easy as dialing a phone.”
“The goal here is to democratize video,” says Seifried, “so that everyone in the organization can now be a participant in a conference experience, whether it’s in a point-to-point video call and/or multiparty calls.”
“Of the room systems, the OpenScape VHD600 has a six-way embedded bridge,” says Seifried. “It can support up to two screens and two cameras. The VHD400 has a four-way embedded bridge with a single camera and single screen support. The smaller VP VHD100 is a point-to-point capable system which allows you to dial into anything else with an embedded bridge. One of the unique things about the codec that we’ve deployed is that it has a full adaptive capability, and this allows people to dial in from, say, their PC in a hotel room that’s running a video client. Let’s also say that there are three other people on the call with HD capability and the bandwidth to support it. Our traveler in the hotel room, however, is the one participant on a low-definition desktop client with limited bandwidth. Other competing systems will typically downgrade the complete videoconferencing stream to the lowest common denominator, so that the individual devices don’t ‘choke’ the low-definition participants.”
“Siemens’ system, however, is able to adapt and personalize the video stream for each of the endpoints,” says Seifried. “So a low-definition stream is delivered to the soft client in the hotel room, but all of the benefits of HD can still be delivered to the other participants. It’s a unique capability, but I think overall the most important message to take away here is that, for the first time ever, enterprises can integrate video from a single vendor and offer unified conferencing, breaking down the barriers between voice and video conferencing.”
“No other vendor in the marketplace has taken the initiative to take voice products,” says Seifreid, “and unified communications products and even an HD video portfolio and actually modify all three areas to ensure interoperability and to create a single, powerful UC capability, right across an organization. We’re really excited about this. And of course HD video has been getting a lot of play in the marketplace. Also, these are affordable devices; they aren’t $250,000 room systems. These devices are in the sub-$20,000 range. The Executive HD Desktop version is just under $9,000.”
“Now you can see some of the value that went into the UC server,” says Howard. “It doesn’t matter whether your dealing with a voice SIP session or a messaging SIP session or a video SIP session. And then there’s the fact that we have massive scalability. For example, you could configure a 100,000 user system. Those could easily be 100,000 video users. Now, that would of course require some considerable bandwidth in the underlying IP network. But with our system you’ve got total flexibility. And you’ve got the QoS management for multiple, differing bandwidths simultaneously, so you can now mix different kinds of users and their devices freely.”
“This is true unified communications with multiple media and presence and clients and mobility, all in a package which allows you to add one user at a time, and with a global licensing model,” says Howard. “The global licensing model is fundamental to all of this,” says Howard. “Many organizations are spread out and have a global model instead of a site-based model. With our system, people can travel from one place to another and still use the same license. We have a hot-disking application whereby people can sign on wherever they go and whatever device they’re using will immediately become ‘theirs’ for the session. And it supports dynamic users, so if you’ve got 3,000 people in your organization but only 1,500 of them are logged on to the system at any one time, you don’t need 3,000 licenses, you only need 1,500. So Siemens has designed this system to be genuinely economical as well as flexible.”
Flexible Unified Communications Packages
“We offer three packages,” says Alina Urdaneta. “The first is the OpenScape UC Application Package. We start with this one because Nortels and Avayas and IBMs of the world already have some established products and being used in the enterprise. But we have a very effective Trojan Horse strategy when we come in with our UC Application and provide these capabilities on any telephony or IT environment. This entry system has a very compelling price point of $14,850, which covers 100 UC Team licenses. Of course there are some services and implementation costs that have to be added to this.”
“The second package is the OpenScape Voice Package, which covers 100 HiPath 8000 and UC Personal Edition licenses. It’s US$33,750,” says Urdaneta.
“Third, if you bundle those together, the OpenScape Voice & UC Application Package with the 100 HiPath 8000 and the 100 UC Personal Edition licenses, you can buy it for $39,150.”
“If you want to add system redundancy to any of these packages, our OpenScape Voice Redundancy Option is US$19,500,” says Urdaneta.
OpenScale Integration Services
Unified Communications Suite also can be combined with a comprehensive software and services portfolio. Siemens’ significant UC services investment plan features the creation of a new Centre of Competence model for the global delivery of unified communication, security and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consultancy and integration services. Thus, UC Server can be integrated with applications from other vendors, such as the Microsoft and IBM ecosystems.
Why Buy this System?
This is the most impressive overhaul of a communications product line that Yours Truly has seen in at least five years. To summarize the key competitive advantages of Siemens UC Server and its accompanying paraphernalia and services…
- Comprehensive, open, third-generation native SIP UC software platform.
- Enterprise-class voice with carrier-class resiliency and scalability.
- Operates in any telephony or IT application environment via OpenPath.
- Flexible Upgrades – you an add new capabilities by activating license keys.
- Deep integration with Microsoft, IBM, and any other Line of Business apps.
- Open standards-based with SDKs and OpenSOA.
- Single vendor unified video conferencing solution for everyone.
- Affordable packages deliver real business value immediately.
Siemens has done a truly amazing job of revitalizing their whole technological and corporate persona. The communications marketplace should be reeling from this for some time to come.
Richard Grigonis is an internationally-known technology editor and writer. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) as Executive Editor of its IP Communications Group, he was the Editor-in-Chief of VON Magazine from its founding in 2003 to August 2006. He also served as the Chief Technical Editor of CMP Media’s Computer Telephony magazine, later called Communications Convergence (News — Alert), from its first year of operation in 1994 until 2003. In addition, he has written five books on computers and telecom (including the Computer Telephony Encyclopedia and Dictionary of IP Communications). To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page. Quality of Service (QoS) | X | | This is an introduction to the planning for QoS and Service Level Agreements. Simply, your performance is QoS and the guarantee is the SLA. That is, if you are not receiving the desired QoS from your ...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X | | A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Extensible Markup Language (XML) | X | | eXtensible Markup Language is a data formatting standard that can be integrated into On-Line Analytical Processing a multi-dimensional database architecture and other protocols such as SOAP (next) and...more |
Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) | X | | SIP is the real-time communication protocol for VoIP. SIP is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification (emergency calling) and instant messaging.
SIP...more |
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) | X | | Originally, telephone features were provided by telephone central office switching systems, often called CENTREX.�PBX systems emerged as customers wanted to have more calling features and control over...more |
(source: http://hdvoice.tmcnet.com/topics/unified-communications/articles/22473-closer-look-siemens-new-openscape-unified-communications-server.htm)
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