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Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc. today announced an extension to its OpenScape Contact Center portfolio in the form of a hosted self service solution. Siemens will be offering the services of Contact Solutions, Inc. (CSI), a privately-held Reston, VA-based firm that has been around since 2002. Certainly there are a number of vendors that already offer hosted self-service solutions. What makes this announcement from Siemens interesting?First, the announcement says something about what's going on at Siemens post-Gores. Business as usual, and I mean that in a good way. While they have tweaked the name of the company a bit (for the umpteenth time), this announcement shows that things are not at a dead standstill at Siemens, waiting for some mythical other shoe to drop. One has to believe that a partnership of this kind takes at least a couple of months. So while Siemens started searching for a partner in the pre-Gores world they were able to make a choice and announce it in a post-Gores one.

Second, the decision to offer hosted self service plays into a stated Siemens objective to increase services revenues. The point is to be a one-stop shopping resource for the Siemens customer that wants to get into sophisticated applications like natural language speech recognition, not send them off to a carrier or third party. With CSI, Siemens is offering its customers solutions that have out-of-the-box integration with existing HiPath platforms and HiPath ProCenter solutions.

Next, the combination of relatively pint-sized CSI and billion-dollar Siemens allows them to offer customers the best of both worlds. CSI offers Siemens a small, focused team steeped in speech recognition and self service design expertise. Siemens offers CSI a large direct sales force, access to Siemens channel partners and the Siemens maintenance organization.

Finally, I love the energy of the CSI team. This is a big opportunity for a relatively small firm, and CEO Paul Logan gets that. Over the next couple of years, there is an opportunity here for him to grow CSI dramatically from the ~200 applications deployed today.

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