Kick-starting Siemens Enterprise Communications: CEO Hamid AkhavanKick-starting Siemens Enterprise Communications: CEO Hamid Akhavan

With the financial and product houses in order, Akhavan is ready to re-launch Siemens Enterprise over the next couple of quarters.

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with Hamid Akhavan, the CEO of Siemens Enterprise. Akhavan assumed the role in February 2010, having previously been COO for Deutsche Telekom Group. As he has worked out of Siemens headquarters in Munich, Germany (going forward, he will spend half his time in Reston, VA), it was my first opportunity to interact with him one-on-one.

I walked into the meeting with a short list of topics, knowing that often a CEO will take an interview like this down a path of his own choosing. As it turned out, he spent our 75 minutes together answering--with convincing detail--my first question, "You came to Siemens a little over 18 months ago. How is the company different today than when you arrived?"

Akhavan established three priorities for the business early in his tenure. First was to make the company financially stronger, what he called basic "blocking and tackling," to ensure that Siemens Enterprise was a "healthy business." In addition to right-sizing the number of employees, he successfully worked on establishing the company's bond rating. This enabled Siemens to go into the market and acquire capital--more as a sign of the financial viability of the firm than because they needed cash. Akhavan says they never actually dipped into those funds, but it gave him a cushion to have money for the occasional acquisition (e.g., web collaboration firm FastViewer at the end of 2010) without worry.

The next priority was the portfolio. It was at this point that Hamid took to the white board in his office and sketched the voice platforms that existed when he arrived: OpenScape Voice (SIP-based), OpenScape Office (IP only), HiPath 4000 (hybrid TDM/IP) and HiPath 3000 (hybrid TDM/IP).

Based on joint development by the carrier and enterprise units of Siemens at the time, OpenScape Voice scaled up dramatically well. In a world moving toward Cloud, Hamid saw in OpenScape Voice the ideal truly multi-tenant platform from which to launch cloud-based UC services. By March 2011, Siemens was ready to announce its OpenScape Cloud strategy at Enterprise Connect.

The discussion then turned to what was done with the HiPath 3000, a system targeted at SMBs. It was a very successful product for Siemens, and the company found that some users did not have a strong need to upgrade to the more feature-rich OpenScape Office that Siemens had introduced in 2007. So in 2011, Siemens announced the HX edition of OpenScape Office to work as a feature server to HiPath 3000. This allows customers to add some newer features, such as conferencing or mobility, while keeping the core system in place.

With the success of HiPath 4000 (millions of ports sold), as is true with all of the traditional voice vendors, it will take several more years to move that base to the next generation product, OpenScape Voice and UC Server. Several OpenScape applications (e.g., UC, Mobility and Contact Center) have long been available to the HiPath 4000 customer. With HiPath 4000 Version 6, announced in February 2011, the solution can be sold on industry standard hardware--making it attractive to the buyers interested in data center deployments.

So what was Akhavan's third priority? Marketing and brand revitalization. With his financial and product houses in order, Hamid is ready to re-launch Siemens Enterprise over the next couple of quarters. Maybe at Enterprise Connect 2012?