Siemens recently introduced OpenScale which is its brand for its multivendor, UC services portfolio. Siemens is also strengthening its global service infrastructure and accelerating its ability to deliver software-based UC services. Siemens’ new UC services investment plan also involves creation of a new Center of Competence model for the global delivery of UC, security and CRM consultancy and integration services, along with new facilities to build and pre-test global VoIP and UC solutions prior to final roll-out. This investment plan will introduce a consistent workflow environment across the Siemens networked global service infrastructure of Service Centers, Network Operation Centers and Solution Support Centers. It also involves a new global customer portal and new tools for proactive network monitoring. The initiative also substantially improves customer visibility of global service performance, increase speed-of-resolution, and provides a global Service Management platform for design and delivery of IP-based UC environments.
Richard “Zippy” Grigonis recently spoke with Grace Tiscareño- Sato about Siemens and its continuing UC efforts.
RG: Unified communications seems to finally be making major inroads into vertical markets.
GTS: Organizations that embed UC directly into their applications in the workplace will discover that they’ve achieved new competitive advantages. You’ll soon see a whole wave of case studies on this during 2008. We see such UC integrations in real estate, health care, automotive, and the first two industries with which we were involved, financial services and pharmaceuticals. Those five industries are well on their way to understanding the value of such deployments.
RG: What about UC as a hosted service with a monthly per-user fee?
GTS: We now offer the OpenScape Enterprise Hosted version that service providers can integrate into their datacenters. It’s a joint effort with Accenture and Ensim Corporation, and Siemens created the provisioning, billing and management software interfaces. One piece of research I uncovered prior to our May 2007 launch indicated just how much growth has slowed in the software-as-a-product industry, from 10 percent a year growth to 7 percent in 2007 and 4 percent projected for 2008. That’s trending down to zero really fast. Software vendors selling shrink-wrapped software are going as far as offering ‘car-like deals’ like zero percent financing for five years, which is amazing. Software industry entrepreneur Ann Winblad says that 100 percent of the business plans she’s seen lately for new applications call for hosted delivery. So it appears that more carriers and providers will adopt platforms that allow them to enter this revolution with UC and they’ll discover that it really is a way to create multiple new revenue streams for themselves and bring forth value. If they’re already hosting applications for their customers, how fabulous it would be for their system integration business – as part of their Manages Service Provider (MSP) service, to be able to bring UC directly into what they’re already hosting. One of our customers is already doing that for his customer base.
RG: As I recall, the economics of SMBs has always favored hosted or managed services. Today, it’s almost as if the ASP model has returned.
GTS: What’s different this time is that there’s a whole lot more customization that can be done. And there’s not as much of an ‘up-front’ expenditure as was sometimes the case with the ASP model. We’ve learned a lot since those days and managed service providers are more sophisticated. They’re also ‘choosier’ in what they’re going to host. They aren’t going to host 50 apps and hope something works. They’re more targeted in how they want to differentiate themselves, because they know there will be more providers like themselves coming along.
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