The Lippis Report

By Siemens Enterprise Communications

The contact center landscape is experiencing significant changes, both in the business model itself and its underlying technology. The ability to access telephony and applications over the Internet has increased the flexibility of the contact center workforce, introducing a new trend: the work-at-home agent. Driven by a greater need for both flexibility and cost control, cloud contact center solutions (also known as hosted contact centers) are seeing double-digit growth rates. Cloud contact centers provide a number of business benefits: improved business agility, decreased capital expense, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This white paper provides a best practices for exploiting cloud base contact centers securely, with compliance controls and built-in disaster recovery.

By Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc.

Until recently, technologies such as unified communications (UC) might have seemed strictly the domain of big business. Now, though, UC goes straight to the heart of many of the SMB challenges you face.

Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc.

There’s a paradigm shift coming. And it’s going to have a huge impact on your business communications. It will challenge longstanding conventions of total cost of ownership, of deployment models, and of just how, where and when we engage with colleagues, customers and stakeholders. It’s going to significantly alter the communications status quo. And failure to respond will put your competitive advantage at risk. It’s the collision of five megatrends that will forever change our working practices, our relationships with communication devices, and our ability to work productively, efficiently and creatively. It’s as significant as the advent of the internet, and it’s going to usher in a new era of cloud communications. And it’s happening right now.
Is your business prepared for the Communications Tipping Point?

The UC market is rapidly moving toward a cloud service for the small to medium business (SMB) market, thanks to Siemens Enterprise Communications and others offering powerful communications and office productivity software delivered as a service. Cloud services offer the SMB market with some of the same IT services that large enterprises enjoy, but without the complexity and cost. For example, Siemens has been working with Google to offer its OpenScape Cloud Service that integrates features into Google applications, like click to call/conference, etc. In this Lippis Report podcast, I talk with Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy at Siemens Enterprise Communications, about the SMB market and how its OpenScape Cloud Services is offering new, innovative solutions that allows these firms to be more competitive and agile.

By Siemens Enterprise Communications

One of the greatest obstacles of virtualization is the assignment and allocation of appropriate network resources as virtual machines (VMs) are provisioned amongst diverse network locations. Virtualizing a single data center introduces a number of challenges, not the least of which necessitates moves, adds and changes of virtual images, which adds network provisioning complexity and impacts IT administration workload. Virtualized data center networks need to provide automation, visibility and mobility to support multi-vendor storage, virtualization software and server environments.

Find out how by downloading this white paper:

By Siemens Enterprise Communications

In the U.S., a Pacific Northwest state is saving almost $2 million per year by deploying IP Least Cost Routing. A New York-based insurance company has shifted 70,000 calls per week onto its new internal SIP network, saving about 13,000 hours per month of voice traffic which previously had gone to a PSTN carrier. Meanwhile, in Europe, a large manufacturing company is saving 35% of its inter-site communication costs by moving to SIP Trunking.

SIP Trunking is a well-proven technology, with many carriers offering the service, both domestically and internationally. Typical savings from using SIP Trunking can range from 25% to 50%.

Find out how to use SIP and save by downloading this paper

By Siemens Enterprise Communications

This white paper examines the requirements for and use of Intelligent Branches and Gateways for Enterprise, Service Provider and Cloud Applications. It explains how modern communications products can provide scalable and feature-rich communications. The paper also shows how Intelligent Branch Solutions save significant bandwidth to the Branch and explores some of the new features required for next-generation Intelligent Branch solutions.

Find out how by downloading this white paper

Contact center technology is being virtualized at the agent desktop and server levels offering favorable economics, agent flexibility and a centralized data center deployment design. For Siemens Enterprise Communications, a leader in the Contact Center market, its OpenScape Contact Center V8 software runs on top of a VMware hypervisor. In addition to efficient server deployment V8 adds powerful agent features such as a Web-based agent, supervisor and management desktops making it easier to deploy home-based or remote agents virtually at multiple locations. George Despinic, Global Contact Center Marketing Manager for Siemens Enterprise Communications is my guest as we discuss the company’s OpenScape Contact Center V8 that puts contact center functionality in a virtualized data center offering new design and economic options for contact center deployments.

The Unified Communications (UC) market is changing significantly in terms of how solutions are deployed, services are packaged and systems procured. Siemens addressed all of these areas in one fell swoop with the recently released OpenScape UC Server 2010. Siemens announced new licensing options for endpoints and integrated UC endpoint services in packaged solutions including social media plug-ins such as Twitter. Kathy Heilmann, Director, Large Enterprise Voice and UC Solutions Marketing at Siemens Enterprise Communications joined me to talk about the new rules of UC procurement and its value to IT business leaders.

By Aberdeen Group

With so many potential points of contact: desk phones, soft phones, voice messaging, e-mail, video conferencing, texting, social media, mobile devices etc., how can we ever actually be reached within a reasonable timeframe? How does UC transform an organization’s communications infrastructure, improve efficiency, optimize work processes, and provide for business continuity and compliance? To find out, in February and March 2010, Aberdeen Group surveyed 184 organizations in more then 28 countries around the world. This paper is the result of that effort.

Find out what Aberdeen learned by downloading this whitepaper.

In their recently released OpenScape UC Server 2010, Siemens has incorporated application virtualization allowing UC applications such as OpenScape Voice, OpenScape Branch, OpenScape Media Server etc., to load on standard compute hardware avoiding the installation, configuration and maintenance of running multiple complex software stacks, operating systems and applications. Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy at Siemens Enterprise Communications, joins me to talk about what virtualization in a UC environment delivers to IT business leaders as we dive into the details of UC Server 2010.
Find out by listening to this podcast.

In late March of 2009 Siemens Enterprise Communication announced a UC cloud service where it has placed its OpenScape Voice and UC applications on Amazon’s EC2 cloud infrastructure. This is significant and important as it’s the first time that a UC application is available in the cloud and offered in a SaaS model. This represents a new and fundamentally different channel to address the SMB market. The hope is that UC delivered as a SaaS offers a radically different delivery and price model and may very well be the model enterprises have been waiting for to consume UC on a massive scale. Paul McMillan Director of UC Technical Vision & Strategy at Siemens Communications is my guest as we talk about UC in the cloud and offered as a SaaS.

By Mainstay Partners

In 2007 Siemens Enterprise Communications deployed its OpenScape UC Server at its own offices to both reap its benefits and measure costs. Siemens commissioned an internal business case analysis, which concluded that the project could cut communications costs by up to 30%, saving millions each year. In less than six months Siemens deployed OpenScape UC Server at its North American operations, linking 21 offices and connecting more than 1,900 employees, including some 500 home-based teleworkers. To quantify the benefits post deployment, Siemens asked independent advisory firm Mainstay Partners to conduct a financial assessment of the project.

This white paper contains Mainstay’s findings of $35.5m in cost savings and productivity gain. Download it now.

Of the original 500 S&P companies just 82 remain. The pace of change and corporate flexibility required to keep up continues to dramatically accelerate. Both McKinsey & Company and Boston Consulting Group say one-third of companies in the top quarter of their industry failed to maintain their competitive position during the 2000 economic slowdown. Five years later, just 10% returned to their same competitive position. The Business Roundtable reports 45% of CEOs expect declining sales over the next six months. The bottom line is that companies which excel figure out how to save money but also prepare for the rebound. Mark Straton, Senior Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Siemens Communications is my guest as we discuss three imperatives for communications management during a tough economy that will ensure your company maintains its competitive position during and after the economic slowdown.