Siemens Enterprise Communications Unveils Latest OpenScape UC Platform

As the mobile workforce continues to proliferate, organizations are challenged with unifying all devices and communications to achieve operational efficiencies.

Siemens (News - Alert) Enterprise Communications has announced the latest version of its OpenScape UC Suite, which will offer a single unified communications domain for organizations ranging from 100 to 500,000 users. The latest version of the company’s UC platform, which will be available in June, offers improved scalability, mobility and federation, and enhanced public and private cloud capabilities, according to a company statement.

“Our customers include some of the largest organizations in the world and they need the productivity and collaboration benefits of unified communications the most – inside their walls, within their extended organizations and while mobile,” said Chris Hummel, CMO and president, North America, Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert). “OpenScape UC Suite is unique in the industry for its ability to provide UC to extended organizations of all sizes and to deliver a consistent UC experience on the user’s device of choice.”

OpenScape UC Suite can also provide economies of scale in public and private cloud deployments, creating a unified user experience for presence, messaging, contacts and directories in large multi-site, multi-vendor organizations. The platform will be able to support massively-scaled global UC deployments with up to 40,000 UC users per cluster and up to 500,000 UC users per system.

The new UC platform comes on the heels of the company’s recently released State of Enterprise Communications 2012 Study, which found that so-called pure IP infrastructures save enterprises 43 percent over traditional PBX systems.

The study also found that an increasingly mobile workforce is forcing more enterprises to adapt cloud technology, and that staff training and headcount issues often delay a company’s migration to a UC platform.

In fact, according to the Siemens study, 80 percent of user end-points are now outside of corporate headquarters, underscoring the trend toward distributed and mobile workforces.

OpenScape UC Suite will help address these mobile needs with its new OpenScape Mobile clients for Apple iOS and Android (News - Alert). These new clients bring comprehensive VoIP and UC functionality, along with unique gesture-driven capabilities, to smart phones and tablets. These mobile clients are app store ready, providing greater choice to users while supporting the growing “consumerization of IT” trend.

“The ability to collaborate is becoming a prevailing requirement for mobile personnel, so IT support for the use of leading smart phones and tablets is very relevant,” said Jay Lassman, a research director at Gartner (News - Alert). “This approach not only enables broader use of the enterprise communications network, but also aligns with the growing desire among people who are already using a preferred mobile device.”

The new OpenScape UC Suite also helps users share their presence availability and exchange instant messages with users of Google (News - Alert) or any XMPP-capable solution, including UC, messaging, social media and collaboration applications, whether on a PC client, tablet or smart phone.

This release of the OpenScape UC Suite will include 100 other updates such as: application improvements such as new video capabilities; web collaboration with a new Mac OS client and a Microsoft Outlook plug-in; enhanced contact center integrated call recording capabilities; and branch and session border controller enhancements to provide remote servicing capabilities and greater scalability.