"Hey, you got your PBX in my UC server." "No, you got your UC server in my PBX!" There's a certain Reese's Peanut Butter Cup quality to this week's product announcement from Siemens Enterprise Communications. The company's new OpenScape Unified Communications Server takes the session control capabilities of its HiPath 8000 software-based SIP communications platform and the presence management of the OpenScape unified communications middleware and sticks them on the same server.
"Hey, you got your PBX in my UC server."
"No, you got your UC server in my PBX!"
There's a certain Reese's Peanut Butter Cup quality to this week's product announcement from Siemens Enterprise Communications. The company's new OpenScape Unified Communications Server takes the session control capabilities of its HiPath 8000 software-based SIP communications platform and the presence management of the OpenScape unified communications middleware and sticks them on the same server.In my eyes this sort of offering, more than last week's announcement that Siemens will sell off its manufacturing operations, is valid evidence of the company's intent to focus its business more around software and services than proprietary, hardware-based PBX platforms. I mean, any hardware developer can outsource manufacturing and still be a hardware developer. But it's things like Siemens' OpenScape UC Server, Alcatel-Lucent's OmniTouch Suite, Cisco's IP Communicator, and other such offerings that show how PBX and network systems developers are veering away from quickly commoditizing hardware and steering toward value-added apps.
What fascinates me most about OpenScape UC Server is Siemens' untethering itself from dependence on Microsoft and IBM as IM developers. When it was released - in what was it? 2003? - OpenScape had no native IM server. Businesses needed to deploy it with Microsoft Live Communications Server. More recently support for Microsoft Office Communications Server and IBM Sametime were added, but one of these was definitely still required as OpenScape provided mainly telephony presence and rules-based routing of incoming calls. But now the OpenScape software, which will reside on the UC Server as its "UC Application," will support IM server software from Jabber and Netviewer. Businesses can still deploy it alongside OCS or Sametime if they have already made investments in Microsoft or IBM technology. But these are no longer required.
Breaking dependence on Microsoft is vital to companies like Siemens Enterprise Communications. As PBX vendors steer a course away from hardware deliverables and endeavor to be recognized as software developers in their own right, they will find companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Oracle very much in their way. But Microsoft and the others have by no means cornered the communications software market and at this point are not close to doing so. The more pieces of the unified communications puzzle that Siemens, Cisco, and the others can provide, the better off they will be in establishing themselves in the market for software-based communications solutions.
