The move supports the Siemens Enterprise Communications’ Open Communications commitment to offer partners and customers the most open, flexible and future-proof telephony and unified communications (UC) platform, as well as building on support for virtualised real-time communications from VMware.
"Our companies share a common goal of delivering real-time communications as a virtual appliance, thereby enabling UC technologies to leverage the benefits of the VMware platform: significant improvements in total cost of ownership, high availability, performance and business continuity," said Parag Patel, vice president, alliances at VMware. "Through our companies' collaboration, we are enabling customers who use VMware vSphere to use a common management toolset for all of their applications, including new OpenScape UC 2010 UC solutions, further driving data center efficiencies and providing a clear path to cloud computing."
Working with VMware, Siemens Enterprise Communications will virtualise the OpenScape Voice, Unified Communications and Contact Center portfolio. All of the company’s solutions will benefit from real-time telephony and unified communications that support true server consolidation, storage and processing optimisation and energy efficiency for progressive data centres.
Channel partners will also benefit from Siemens Enterprise Communications virtualisation strategy by leveraging the ‘Virtual Appliance’ software solutions model, which provides pre-packaged initial configuration and installation routines, making it easier to deploy, manage and service virtualised enterprise communications solutions. In addition, the open standards of the OpenScape portfolio and the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) ensures that channel partners can provide their customers with bundled solutions that are hardware agnostic, allowing them to deliver packaged solutions that run on industry standard server hardware. For channel partners that want to provide Communication as a Service (CaaS) or extend offerings to the cloud, the virtualisation of Siemens Enterprise Communications portfolio provides an innovative, future-proof solution.