30 Minute Interview

Open Unified Communications

Peter Gartenberg, CEO, Siemens Enterprise Communications Ltd speaks to Kushal Shah about Unified Communications and how the open platform of the HiPath 8000 provides better administration and low TCO.

Peter Gartenberg

The Trend

What we at Siemens see happening is that IP is going into the next generation. The first generation was focused on IP networking and now we see that IP is moving more towards SIP and an open environment of unified communications (UC). There is a movement from IP as transport to IP as application and more of services. In terms of markets, globally each market is moving at a different pace. Some large companies are looking at various means of delivering voice services to their customers and total cost of ownership is a key issue for them.

An open platform for UC

There are many unified communication products coming to market. We focus on 100% open, non proprietary implementations. Our basic architecture is based on open standards. When we say SIP, it’s pure SIP with no propriety implementation. The reason we think it’s important is that the customers want to be able to implement and get support at a lower cost. Ease of administration is one aspect of this open standard policy. UC involves tying communication into the business process of a corporation. If you don’t follow open standards then integration becomes difficult and it changes the speed of implementation. Apart from that, open standards speed up R&D and operations. It brings the ability to bring products to market at a lower cost. By providing open standards, we give users the freedom to choose the product. I think, the days of being able to lock in customers are coming to an end. It might be working for some of our competitors but it is certainly going down. What we have to offer is extremely competitive TCO technology and we are ready to compete.

Low total cost of ownership

Our objective is to reduce the amount of hardware required for a large scale implementation. As companies grow, they create server farms but what we strive for is more of a mainframe approach with a single server. We are able to do dual server configurations and we are able to scale up to 1,00,000 users. With this, savings become an obvious factor. You are saving on buying hardware, energy consumption, real estate, and air-conditioning and this green approach reduces TCO. The other thing which helps in reducing TCO is shifting to a data center model and allowing the customer to get away from a site-specific model. By consolidating into datacentres they are able to reduce hardware which helps save a lot of operational cost. This in turn reduces the cost to administer in the centralized environment.

Better Administration

Today most companies have multiple locations and these are not unified. You have to physically go there and administer each system separately. With our architecture, you can access each system via the Internet and customize and manage it at the same time. You can have single access to administer any IP. Little islands of systems are much more difficult to manage than a datacenter based telephony system.

A look at future technologies

We are on a rapid innovation cycle. Every three to six months we come out with something new. We have plans for high-definition video and adding more voice applications to the HiPath 8000. We are even thinking of letting developers develop applications for the system. Companies in a certain type of business are looking at customized applications and we want to give them a tool to do that. Further, we are looking to shift towards the wireless theme. We will see more and more bridging of fixed, mobile and and private network applications together. Voice and video over wireless LAN will be things coming out in the future in a more mature state and wireless surveillance will become much more mature.

Indian Market

The Indian market for us is in an early stage. One of the biggest issues for this market is the high usage of analog devices which we see shifting towards digital in some time. We are at about 20% digital penetration. We think it’s going to be fairly gradual approach using our architecture wherein customers can take HiPath 8000 and integrate with existing or Siemens equipment. One more habit we see in India is that they believe in getting optimal value out of their investments and the technology change cycle is a bit slow. We see a large part of business coming from the Indian financial sector and the IT sector and since companies are moving from regional to national and international, we see more business coming our way. Currently, for the last eight years, we have been seeing double digit growth in India.