Interview: Siemens' Thomas Zimmermann

What's driving unified communications?

We see very clearly two trends. First is the convergence of data, voice and other multimedia services. The second is open standards. The main benefits are you can integrate communication into business processes, simplify communications with customers, and get productivity gains in your internal processes.

What are the most popular applications or business tools being integrated?

It's different from theater to theater. In the European market, where we have our main volume, the main driver is integrating voice with applications on the desktop. In North America, which is the more innovative market, we are having detailed discussions around bringing presence and mobility functions into the unified communications world.How are you positioning yourself against Cisco Systems, which is also strongly promoting unified commutations?

Our slogan is simple: Unified communications with open standards. This is what the customer wants. No one wants to get all their IT solutions from one vendor. They want to pick up the best solutions for special areas. Open standards is an important argument.

The second thing is global presence. Having 17,000 employees in 80 countries is a huge advantage we can offer our customers.

You're a strong backer of SIP. How do you leverage open standards as a competitive advantage?

You can see the HiPath 8000 [a SIP-based soft switch] as an IT product that can run on standard hardware, which helps IT to save total ownership costs. We have a technology alliance with Intel, in which the HiPath 8000 is running on Intel hardware.

The second advantage is customers want to integrate unified communications into the desktop solutions, meaning into Microsoft, IBM, and SAP. This is much easier based on SIP, as you have more functionality.

Additionally, I want to mention our SOA architecture, which gives the customers a very flexible framework to integrate new applications in the future into this infrastructure.There's been much talk about the sale of your Siemens division, or being spun off as a separate company. What's it like to be leading the company through those discussions?

The unified communications area, especially in the enterprise field, has a lot of strategic relevance for the other Siemens groups. About 50 percent to 60 percent of our customers are not only customers for our unified communications products, but for other Siemens groups, like medical systems, the manufacturing group, the building security and automation group. So this communication area plays a strategic role for other Siemens groups.

I'm sure you saw Apple iPhone release. Siemens knows a thing or two about smartphones--what's your take on the product?

At the moment it is more focused on the consumer side. However, we will watch this very carefully for what it could mean for enterprise business.

Our main task is to provide enterprise features on the mobile phone. We showed a prototype last year, and we have pilot customers for a seamless handover between GSM and WLAN. Fixed mobile convergence is one thing we are focusing on, and smartphones will play a role. But for us it is only the device. We are working on the software behind it to enable the functionalities.0