Yesterday Siemens Enterprise Communications announced OpenScale, their new global brand name for managed and professional enterprise communication services. At the same time they stated that they would be investing heavily in strengthening their existing global service infrastructure, and capabilities for delivering software-based unified communications services. I found the announcement interesting from a couple of perspectives. The first is that because of Siemens size relative to some companies that have in the past few years started to provide managed services, it gives much more weight to the emphasis in providing managed services across all application areas. It also puts Siemens squarely in the same camp with the big boys, IBM, Avaya, Cisco and BT, who all provide global managed services offerings, and are delivering UC.
Siemens already has a direct local presence in 50 countries and indirect in another 120, so with this managed services offering they are announcing that they will provide extensive third-party management capabilities, ITIL-based portfolio and delivery best practices, and multi-lingual capabilities - supporting over 30 different languages. Under the OpenScale Services brand are managed services, along with consulting, solution design, and implementation. The services cover infrastructure, applications and security for both Siemens products and other vendor’s products.
So this is what caught me about the announcement besides the fact that I am a big proponent of offering customers a choice of management options. In their announcement press release they stated “The company’s UC services investment plan features the creation of a new Center of Competence model for the global delivery of unified communication, security and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consultancy and integration services, together with new facilities to build and pre-test global VoIP and UC solutions prior to final roll-out. The plan will also introduce a global portal for UC real-time service performance monitoring and management, together with a consistent workflow environment across Siemens’ global network of Service Centers, Network Operation Centers and Solution Support Centers. “What a mouthful. However, I like it. Pre-testing solutions prior to roll-out and real service performance monitoring of UC is what we need in UC, particularly as they will insure the health of mixed-vendor implementations. I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this one.