Siemens Enterprise Expands OpenScape Cloud with inContactSiemens Enterprise Expands OpenScape Cloud with inContact

Siemens is increasing its bet that SaaS is a big piece of the future of enterprise communications.

This morning, joint press releases announced that Siemens Enteprise has entered into a global distribution agreement with SaaS-contact center vendor inContact. This is big news for both companies.

At Enteprise Connect 2011, Siemens announced OpenScape Cloud, a SaaS-based unified communications solution. At the time, lack of a contact center application was an obvious gap but one that Siemens already had early designs to fill with inContact.

The timing of this announcement is not coincidental. According to Chris Hummel, CMO and President, North America for Siemens, in the four months since the OpenCloud announcement, Siemens and its partners have been working on field trials. He went on to say that from a commercial standpoint, resellers will now be able to get the complete UC/contact center package they have been asking for. From an operational perspective, resellers will be able to offer both applications from the same Siemens OpenScape Cloud web portal interface (although the applications themselves will be housed in data centers run by the respective partners).)

Asked why the current Siemens offer--OpenScape Contact Center--was not used in the cloud, Hummel’s response is speed to market. He reinforced that Siemens will continue to invest in OpenScape Contact Center and resell Genesys--that each of the three solutions has a place in the portfolio.

Asked why an equity investment instead of an outright purchase of inContact, Hummel says Siemens is walking before they run. The equity investment ensures that inContact has the cash they need for what hopefully will be a rapid acceleration of their business, especially in EMEA. Siemens Enteprise CEO Hamid Akhavan’s seat on the inContact board helps ensure that Siemens has the appropriate governance and control.

For those of us closely watching the SaaS contact center space, inContact began to break away from the pack of small niche players about a year ago. The publicly-held company started as a non-facilities based carrier called UCN. In 2002, they acquired the exclusive marketing rights and in 2005, the technology code base of MyACD. In 2007, they added to the contact center application with the acquisition of ScheduleQ, now inContact WFM product and BenchmarkPortal's ECHO--a customer satisfaction survey product.

By 2009, they were ready to change the name of the company to inContact to publicly signal a business shift--from carrier services reseller to SaaS contact center application provider. 2010 revenues were $82 million, $33.7 million of which came from over 750 deployments in the contact center software segment. In 2010, the company began an international expansion to both EMEA and Asia Pac, which they no doubt hope to accelerate with the Siemens relationship.

The bottom line? Siemens is increasing its bet that SaaS is a big piece of the future of enterprise communications. The stakes may be a little lower for inContact; Siemens is committed to pay a minimum of $15 million of net software revenue to inContact over a 2-year timeframe, $5 million in 2012 and $10 million in 2013.