Siemens: Product Market Strategy with Portals and Content Management Solution

By teaming with Accenture, Siemens has furthered its position as a long-term market leader in the communications space.

Siemens AG, headquartered in Munich, is one of the world's largest electrical engineering and electronics companies. Its more than 470,000 employees develop and manufacture products; design and create systems and plants; and provide customized services. The company supports customers in some 190 countries with innovative technologies and wide-ranging expertise.

Within the global corporation, Siemens Communications Inc. is one of the world's leading vendors of Open Communications solutions for enterprises of all sizes, enabling business processes to be more productive, faster and more secure with any device, network or information technology infrastructure. The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens AG, has 15,000 employees globally and is headquartered in Munich.

When Siemens introduced OpenScape, its leading-edge unified communications application suite, the objective was to reposition the company as not only a hardware company, but also a pioneering software provider. OpenScape is a software suite that helps companies save time and improve productivity, while also reducing communication expenses. OpenScape addresses a critical problem of doing business in a highly mobile and global economy by enabling employees to locate a person anywhere in the world, then instantly communicate via whatever media and device the person is using, whether a land phone, cell phone, computer e-mail or instant messaging.

To take full advantage of OpenScape's vast potential, Siemens needed to identify the industries and business processes that would benefit most from its innovation, and then develop versions of the software customized to meet those industries' specific needs. In addition, Siemens wanted to establish collaborative relationships with service providers that would benefit from integrating OpenScape into their market offerings.

Siemens had a clear goal of maintaining its position as a market leader in the fast-growing and increasingly competitive unified communications market. Given the challenge and scope of the project, Siemens realized it needed to ally with a company that could help identify the industries and business processes, and develop customized solutions for those markets. In 2005, Siemens selected Accenture, because of our deep industry and business process knowledge, coupled with a sophisticated understanding of communication technologies. Since OpenScape is based on Microsoft .NET technology, Accenture's alliance relationships with Microsoft and Avanade, a joint venture company between Accenture and Microsoft, would help expedite solution development. Finally, Accenture's specialists offered a broad range of critical skills spanning market analysis and strategy, technical architecture, portal development and content management, and product development—experience that has enabled communications leaders around the world, like Siemens, to achieve high levels of performance.

Working closely with Siemens, Accenture conducted a thorough assessment of the marketplace, using a number of research sources and resulting in a list of 10 hyper-vertical industries and a corresponding list of 25 to 50 business processes within those markets that would benefit most from OpenScape. Further analysis conducted on a broad range of marketplace data allowed the Siemens and Accenture team to zero in on four primary markets, including pharmaceuticals and financial services, as well as one main business process for each targeted industry. For each industry, Accenture collaborated with Siemens on designing, developing and building solutions that would allow it to seamlessly integrate OpenScape into existing business applications (e.g., SalesForce.com and Siebel eClinical). The marketplace analysis also helped identify potential software partners for Siemens..

Accenture's holistic and integrated approach to creating value from diverse information assets enabled Siemens to effectively drive its OpenScape business with greater speed and accuracy. In addition to identifying market opportunities, Accenture helped develop hosted solutions targeted at service providers, which allows Siemens to offer OpenScape in a software-as-a-service model, known as OpenScape Enterprise Hosted. This lets Siemens' business customers gain all the advantages of OpenScape without the challenge of on-site implementations, while service providers benefit from a new revenue stream. Because of the OpenScape project's scope and complexity, Accenture faced unique challenges, including crafting a profitable market strategy for a product that had not yet been adopted by the mainstream, as well as the complexity of coordinating teams in Europe and the United States as they created solutions for industries with broad and varying needs.

To ensure success, the team employed the Accenture Delivery Methodology to manage the development of the solutions. To gain specialized experience, Accenture tapped our software group and network professionals. Also, to confirm that solutions were leading edge, OpenScape teams collaborated with the Accenture Innovation Center in Murray Hill, New Jersey, taking advantage of state-of-the-art product development tools. Accenture also drew on our Accenture Information Management Services organization, which specializes in such services as portals and content management that allow organizations not only to access, analyze and manage information, but also to use that information to gain insights that drive better decisions leading to higher performance.

By repositioning itself as a provider of both software and hardware, Siemens is opening up new markets and revenue opportunities. In short order, Accenture helped Siemens develop and implement a comprehensive market strategy for OpenScape that delivered impressive results, including the first customer to purchase OpenScape Enterprise Hosted. Also, with Accenture's help, Siemens has established new software partnerships. But most important, by learning how to leverage OpenScape, Siemens is continuing to build on its reputation as a pioneering software maker, with a product that is leading the revolutionary convergence of IT and networks—and transforming business communications. New alliances and partnerships are expanding Siemens' global footprint, while advanced solutions are enabling the company to more rapidly deliver new products to market.

Accenture's continuing research has determined that high-performance businesses are characterized by certain traits, including the ability to create an advantage by innovatively reconfiguring, optimizing and integrating value chains. High performers also are obsessive about continually winning the battle for the customer, based on deep understanding of the customer's behaviors and preferences. By teaming with Accenture, Siemens has furthered its position as a long-term market leader in the communications space.