Siemens Releases OpenScape Unified Communications Suite 7

Siemens Enterprise Communications has recently announced the latest version of its OpenScape UC Suite. Version 7 comes with new scalability, mobility, and federation, as well as improved cloud capabilities and user experience.

OpenScape UC Suite version 7 can provide a single unified communications domain for organizations with anywhere from 100 to 500,000 users to enable a high level of productivity and collaboration for workers everywhere, as well as providing economies of scale in public and private cloud deployments to creat a unified user experience for presence, messaging, contacts, and directories. Large UC deployments are supported, allowing for up to 40,000 UC users per cluster, or 500,000 per system. Users can share their presence availability and instant message with users of Google or any XMPP-capable solution from a PC, tablet, or smartphone.

Included in the new OpenScape UC Suite are: OpenScape UC Application improvements like enhanced Fusion integration and new video capabilities, OpenScape Web Collaboration with a new Mac OS client and Microsoft Outlook plug-in, OpenScale Voice and Management Suite improvements, and OpenScape Branch and Session Border Controller enhancements.

"Siemens already had a fairly broad wireless portfolio, and their OpenScape Mobile client had a neat 'call swipe' gesture to move calls between Wi-Fi and cellular or to the desk set," says Michael Finneran, UCStrategies UC Expert. "In V7 they have enhanced that by allowing calls to be 'swiped' to any device (e.g. a conference phone, home office phone, etc.) greatly enhancing its utility, and they added presence capability to OpenScape Mobile for both iOS and Android devices. They also added secure encrypted voice capability which is critical for remote access through public hot spots."

According to Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies, "One of the biggest challenges of UC today is the lack of federation, which makes UC great for internal communications within a company, but not for external communications with customers, partners, suppliers, and others. By providing federation capabilities and supporting XMPP, OpenScape customers can federate and share presence status, send IM's, and collaborate with people on different systems, such as Jabber, Google Talk and Apple iChat. This capability, and the fact that it's provided at no extra cost, will help customers improve their communication and collaboration capabilities, while enhancing the value of their UC solutions."

"Siemens Enterprise Communications announcement of their new release of OpenScape UC Suite is most notable for removing barriers to adoption of Unified Communications (UC)," according to Marty Parker, Principal Consultant with UniComm Consulting and co-founder of UCStrategies. "While the impressive scalability is important over the long term, the immediate value of OpenScape UC Suite is that Siemens appears to have taken all the rough edges off of a UC deployment. Based on our pre-briefing last week, as well as on the Siemens' response to the Enterprise Connect 2012 RFP: 'UC Without a New PBX,' it is hard to find a barrier to adoption. Siemens OpenScape UC now offers a solid UC Client, comprehensive mobile device support (key in a BYOD world), good conferencing and collaboration functionality, and standards-based integrations to other platforms such as Microsoft Office/Lync/Outlook, IBM Sametime/Notes, Google Apps, social networks, and business applications for CEBP solutions. OpenScape UC Suite will likely be on a growing number of enterprise buyers' short lists."

OpenScape UC Suite version 7 is set to be made available in June 2012.

For more information, visit Siemens Enterprise Communications.