Siemens Communications

The Need for a Unified Communications Infrastructure
When a large European car manufacturer needed a unified communications solution for its 17,000 employees, many of whom are either mobile or remotely located, it turned to Siemens AG of Germany, whose HiPath CorporateConnect solution provided its employees with the ability to be reached anywhere via a single telephone number.

Siemens' client is one of the world's leading automobile manufacturers, owned by an even larger multinational corporation, that builds passenger cars sold by 1,800 car dealerships in 165 countries. Its headquarters manufacturing facility was designated as its global center of excellence for vehicle safety testing. As such, it needed a way to efficiently manage and unify communications for a diverse set of employees in a wide variety of locations, both within and outside of Europe and the United States

The Siemens Communication Solution
Siemens had designed HiPath CorporateConnect, a family of scalable, flexible, and easy-to-implement and use unified communications solutions for businesses, designed to improve an organization's ability to communicate both internally and externally with customers and suppliers. "In developing the HiPath solution, we felt that a vertically integrated, proprietary approach would have a short market life and would be expensive to evolve over the longer term," says Lars Arnheim, Siemens' product manager, mobile office solutions. "We decided to seek enabling technology that was open, standards-based, and could support the breadth of features and scale that we wanted to deliver to clients such as this auto manufacturer," Arnheim says. Enter NMS Communications, a leading provider of global communications technologies and solutions.

Flexible and Feature-Rich Power
NMS is an acknowledged industry leader with more than 20 years' experience in providing enabling technology for innovative communications solutions, and already counted Siemens among its satisfied customers. Based on this existing relationship, Siemens' management felt that NMS could be the right partner to help power their new unified communications offering. After a very detailed review of available options and a rigorous selection process, Siemens chose NMS and its Open Access platform of communications building blocks.

NMS won the HiPath CorporateConnect business because of its open, flexible products and ability to meet Siemens' very specific requirements. In particular, Siemens was impressed by NMS' ability to partner, as NMS exhibited an in-depth understanding of how best to optimize its technology to fit Siemens' business objectives and respond to Siemens' changing market needs. Says Arnheim, "We also realized the NMS product enabled a great breadth of features we could then incorporate into a series of modular offerings comprising the HiPath CorporateConnect line," giving Siemens an important advantage over its competition. And finally, Siemens was pleased with NMS' outstanding technical support, both pre- and post-sale.

Open Access: Meeting Siemens' Needs
For the HiPath CorporateConnect product, Siemens chose NMS' AG 4000 platform, a member of the Open Access family of products. The Open Access framework encompasses all the functionality for developing and deploying rich applications and innovative communications services, while offering the integration features, efficiency, and long-term sustainability that Siemens was seeking in a platform for the HiPath CorporateConnect product. Specifically, the AG 4000 is a cost-effective platform that offers unmatched capability for mixed media types to service a wide range of voice and signaling applications. NMS' AG 4000 boards reside in the HiPath ConnectServer, and enable pass-through dialing from any phone, PC, or PDA for callback.

With the AG 4000 platform, NMS provided ISDN Supplementary Services for most of the key features that HiPath CorporateConnect offers to Siemens customers, such as the multinational auto manufacturer, including:

• Call forwarding
• Signaling of new voice messages
• Call waiting
• Conferencing
• Callback CCBS, CCNA (call completion services)
• Call transfer
• Hold and retrieve

These features and others like them provide the core functionality behind the HiPath CorporateConnect product, enabling Siemens to offer a variety of advanced applications and feature sets to this client and other multinational enterprise customers with complex and costly communications needs.

A Flexible, Integrated Solution Benefits the Client
By installing Siemens' HiPath CorporateConnect running on NMS' AG 4000, the auto manufacturer was able to successfully manage and unify its corporate telecommunications system in an efficient, cost-effective fashion. Powered by NMS' Open Access platform, the Siemens HiPath CorporateConnect solution, characterized by flexibility and integration, offers its client the following key benefits:

• Single-number service. The client's employees no longer need two or three telephones; with HiPath CorporateConnect, they now use a single telephone — the GSM mobile phone — which provides all the features the corporate telecom infrastructure has always offered. The primary benefit: callers can be reached anywhere within the company via a single phone number, whether they are in the U.S., in London or at another European plant. A secondary benefit: mobile communication costs are greatly reduced.
  
• A single voice mailbox. This feature simplifies communications for both the client's employees — who are now assured of getting all their messages in a timely fashion — and outside callers, who are no longer forced to leave the same message at different numbers, creating confusion, inefficiency, and unnecessary callbacks.
  
• Familiar features. Siemens' HiPath CorporateConnect enables the client's employees in Europe to use with their GSM phones all the functions they were accustomed to using on their fixed-line telephones. Features like call pickup, conference calling, call follow-me, and call forwarding to coworkers are available, and even automatic retries are possible when a number is busy or the person does not answer.
  
• Ease-of-use. The auto manufacturer's employees within their home country can now be reached on their GSM phones with a simple five-digit number, and other users on the parent company's worldwide network can be reached with eight-digit numbers. HiPath CorporateConnect eliminates the need to dial complicated country codes and area codes, so international coworkers can be dialed just as easily from a mobile phone as from a desk phone.
  
• Cost savings. Because international calling is no longer necessary, HiPath CorporateConnect saves the car manufacturer money by directing GSM calls on its own network using least-cost routing (LCR). As such, all internal calls, even those to other parent company units in Europe, are free. External calls within the home country are charged at a fixed rate, offering solid economic benefits. In addition, there are resource savings as data for all calls can be recorded, consolidated, and analyzed for exact cost allocation and detailed accounting. Before, wireless and fixed-line calls were billed separately, creating extra financial assessment work.

A Partnership Based on Success
Thanks to NMS' open, flexible products and ability to partner in order to meet Siemens' very specific customer requirements, Siemens was able to realize its key goals in serving its multinational customer's unified messaging needs, enhancing the company's internal and external communication infrastructure by allowing users to select from among fixed, wireless, and mobile networks, depending on the specific need at a particular time. The end result? With NMS' help, Siemens expanded its client's communication infrastructure's flexibility and integration capability, allowing useful, functional and innovative collaboration solutions on a global level.