Clouds in various shapes and forms have been the talk of the industry for the past 18 months. Many enterprise communications cloud offerings have depended on traditional service providers to buy the required equipment and applications as well as build the go-to-market strategy and channel. The riskiness of this proposition for most service providers (fresh from the Application Service Provider debacle when the tech bubble burst) has left vendors often more intimately involved in service creation and delivery than they might have hoped.
Cisco's Hosted Unified Communications, now Hosted Collaboration Service (HCS) comes to mind, where a "Build, Operate, Transfer" model has been employed, e.g., with British Telecom. Cisco initially builds the required infrastructure and operates the service in the hope that they can one day transfer it to the carrier. Interactive Intelligence’s Communications as a Service (CaaS), launched in 2009 and focused primarily on the contact center, uses a different model. The company’s self-hosted applications are offered side-by-side with CPE versions of the same product by channel partners. They are incented to offer CaaS with a percent of the monthly fees as well as the opportunity to realize additional consulting and professional services revenues.
This week both here at Enterprise Connect and in Europe at the CeBIT show in Germany, Siemens Enterprise Communications enters the cloud fray. While arguably their OpenScape UC Server has been offered in private cloud environments for a few years, the OpenScape Cloud Services announcement catapults Siemens into the thick of the cloud conversation:
* Instead of starting in one country and expanding over time, Siemens is initially launching the service in three countries: US, Germany and The Netherlands. Siemens says these three key markets give them access to 49% of the global addressable market.
* Siemens will be hosting and delivering OpenScape Cloud Services from four datacenters, two in Germany and two in the US. This gives them full data center redundancy from the outset.
* OpenScape Cloud services will be offered via Indirect channels only. Initial partners include: Blackbox in the US, mr.net and Telefonbau Schneider in Germany and Televersal, ICT Trends Group and onecentral in the Netherlands. Partners have the flexibility to use the Siemens brand, co-brand or private label the services they offer.
* Using as a starting point the web portal interface from the hosted multimedia collaboration company Siemens Enterprise acquired in December 2010 (FastViewer) OpenScape Cloud Services Portal was created. The portal supports both end user administrators and the partners selling the services. As seen in the included end user dashboard screenshot, the portal can be branded by the partner.
In our discussion, Siemens Enterprise's President, North America and CMO Chris Hummel described the announcements being made this week (which also include new SMB and Enterasys wireless solutions) as the first part of a cloud strategy. For example, initially OpenScape Contact Center is not part of the offer. Maybe at Enterprise Connect 2012.
