Siemens Expands OpenScape(R) Unified Communications Portfolio to Provide Industry’s Most Complete Range of Premise-Based and Hosted Solutions

Siemens Communications, Inc. (NYSE: SI) has unleashed three new advances in its market-leading OpenScape unified communications portfolio to help enterprises overcome the barriers of today’s fragmented communications, while offering a flexible new range of solutions that match the diverse needs of the enterprise. At the entry-level, the new OpenScape VoiceLink solution telephony-enables Microsoft’s Office Communicator client and provides an easy starting point for adoption of unified communications at the desktop. The new SIP-enabled version of OpenScape VoiceLink now supports Siemens’ highly scalable HiPath 8000 IP softswitch.






Also announced today, the new release of OpenScape Enterprise expands Siemens leadership in embedding real-time communications in key business processes by allowing more simplified Web-Services integrations with enterprise applications, and provides a new Toolbar desktop client for Windows. The unique OpenScape Toolbar client allows users to access all the power of aggregated multimedia presence, instant messaging, voice and Web conferencing while still allowing full desktop ’real-estate’ to be allocated to line of business applications.






The third element in the portfolio announcement is OpenScape Enterprise Hosted, the industry’s first unified communications product embracing the rapidly emerging ’software as a service’ model. In a joint effort with Accenture and Ensim Corporation, Siemens created the provisioning, billing and management software interfaces needed for quick deployment of OpenScape Enterprise Hosted into service provider networks with minimal integration and investment. This allows faster delivery of the benefits of unified communications to the SME market or large enterprises for a monthly, per-user fee.






By hosting OpenScape’s rich features for their customers, service providers gain all-new multiple revenue sources plus a big differentiator in hyper-competitive markets. And their business customers can start using OpenScape’s presence-powered collaboration tools almost turnkey with lower entry costs versus an on-premise installation.






“While others talk about future plans to offer unified communications services to service providers, Siemens already has service provider customers selling OpenScape-based services around the globe,” said Eve Aretakis, CEO, Siemens Communications, Inc.






One is Telstra, Australia’s largest provider of business communication services, which has branded its OpenScape-based hosted service as Telstra Live Connect(TM).






“With Telstra Live Connect, organizations can migrate to IP services at their own pace,” said David Thodey, Group Managing Director, Telstra Enterprise and Government. “By dispensing with missed calls, phone tag and information bottlenecks through OpenScape’s presence and collaboration tools, our business customers enjoy better time and resource management, better access to their people and expertise, and faster decision-making that all accelerate the execution of their core business activities.”






Thodey said Telstra chose OpenScape for three reasons: Its full suite of communication and collaboration features; its seamless integration with customers’ current systems, including their desk and mobile phones; and its powerful Web Services toolkit.






In Atlanta, Engage, Inc. became the first North American Managed Services Provider to offer OpenScape as a service. “As a Managed Services Provider and software development firm, we first used OpenScape internally to accelerate our team workflow. We then developed a unique provisioning engine to serve our customers and resellers and have been hosting OpenScape as a new source of revenue and value-add,” said Todd Sharp, Director. “Even more, with OpenScape’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and open architecture, we can integrate it within our customer’s business processes and applications as another revenue source. In fact, we expect OpenScape-based solutions to become about 40 percent of our revenue in three years.”






Siemens new expanded portfolio of OpenScape unified communications solutions is now available globally through Siemens direct, value-added reseller and service-provider channels.