Siemens: We're Here, We're Stable

"Two years' uncertainty have ended," Otterbach said. He insisted that the extended process of finding a buyer for SEN had been a "controlled process--except for the communications" that was relayed to the industry about the progress of the effort. But the key message to start out today's talk was, "We are there, we are stable."

And they have cash, a 350-Euro investment from Siemens AG that means, "We will be in the driver's seat in the future" as the industry consolidates.

Otterbach moved on to the mobility announcement that Michael Finneran blogged about. Otterbach positioned this in the context of the complete UC vision that Siemens has built around the Unified Communications Server and OpenScape Unified Communications Suite of applications. SEN has consistently set the pace in the industry for UC vision, and hasn't necessarily been rewarded in kind--partly, of course, due to the aforementioned uncertainty over its ownership. Mobility was a key final piece to add.

However, I found it interesting that the compelling story Otterbach told about actual investment in the technology was a case study of a company that did a pretty conventional IP-telephony deployment. You've gotta like the numbers involved--the customer saved $1.3 million a year by consolidating 23 PBXs to a pair of redundant servers, while also consolidating WAN circuits, simplifying telecom services, reducing travel via greater video use and saving 70% on conferencing by taking audio conferences internal. But breakthrough UC it wasn't.

Of course, this story is hardly unique to Siemens. If you want to tell an ROI story--which you do want to do these days--basic IP telephony still makes the biggest impact. That's true for all the vendors; they tend to talk UC and sell IPT. I expect that'll change--eventually.