Here’s the scenario: You’re a big enterprise with a lot of employees, but you really don’t have the time, money or manpower to completely deploy unified communications on premise. According to Siemens, that problem is no longer a problem. Siemens Enterprise Communications is now bringing its UC offerings you know and love in a cloud format, thanks to UC cloud company inContact. Is this turning Siemens into a value-added distributor for UC cloud solutions? Read on for the details …

The OpenScape Cloud Contact Center is designed to be an all-in-one UC command center for video, presence, voice and other mobility UC options, providing an off-premise and cost-effective UC solution. But this solution isn’t an in-house production from Siemens. The company is actually leveraging and reselling inContact’s own solution and branding it as the OpenScape Cloud Contact Center. In return, Siemens is making an equity investment in inContact to fuel its software development process.

Rather than develop expertise in house, Siemens looked to existing cloud providers to capitalize on the ongoing cloud momentum. According to Siemens, inContact “complement[ed] our existing product lines.” For both companies, it’s a symbiotic relationship, since Siemens can add another notch in its UC belt without spending on infrastructure, and inCloud’s solution is proliferated deeper into the channel and marketplace.

What’s more, the new solution can also act as an add-on to existing on-premise solutions, providing an elastic way of expanding and contracting UC needs as a companies priorities shift. If you like the Siemens/inContact solution, but would like an on-premise or hybrid-based approach, you can have that too.

It’s all available now for VARs and customers alike. A more detailed feature list of OpenScape Cloud Solution Center and Contact Center is available, too. Worth noting: This isn’t Siemens’ first shift to the cloud — the company announced its cloud strategy in March 2011, and now Ingram Micro’s Cloud Marketplace is offering Siemens’ entire UC portfolio on its own cloud. It’s likely UC in the cloud will be an ongoing and upcoming trend.

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4 Comments on “UC in the Sky with Siemens”

  1. Chris Hummel Says:
    June 16th, 2011 at 11:20 am

    Good overview of key elements of the partnership. However, “symbolic” dramatically undersells the value to both companies. First, inContact has chosen Siemens Enterprise as a major global distributor and established a special, exclusive partnership to develop the European market. Also, Siemens Enterprise has invested nearly $24M in inContact and committed an additional $15M in revenue to inContact. That’s pretty serious!

  2. Dave Courbanou Says:
    June 16th, 2011 at 4:54 pm

    Hi Chris,

    Thanks so much for all the monetary details, it’s much appreciated. You’re right, it’s a pretty serious investment. We’ll be sure to keep watch on it.

    But I think you may have misread “symbiotic,” as “symbolic.” I was merely stating that the relationship is mutually beneficial.

    Thanks for reading,

    -Dave

  3. Chris Hummel Says:
    June 16th, 2011 at 5:43 pm

    Good catch. Might be time for reading glasses . . .

  4. rokon Jaman Says:
    July 7th, 2011 at 4:41 pm

    I think strategically siemens will be more benefited. They have number of on-premise based UC partner and customer. Siemens is now clearly a step ahead to lead UC business. The training and Datacenter experience will help its staff to utilize it to other partners and customers.

    inContact will be able to increase its customers under Siemens branding. But strategically they are letting their business to share with giant like Siemens Enterprise making Mr. Akhavan one of the director of the board.

    Siemens has already added several cloud services into their portfolio. With this agreement it can now offer the similar cloud services like presence, audio, video, messaging, etc to other customers who are already using the same but on-premise based.

    The brand name is important.. is inContact loosing its uniqueness in cloud based contact center business??

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