Siemens Downsizes Softswitch and Scales Up Office-in-a-Box

Siemens Communications is working on both a downsized version of its IP softswitch to support user numbers down to 300, and a scaled-up version of its office-in-a-box offering to take it up to that same number of users.

Martin Northend, head of portfolio business management in the UK for the German conglomerate’s comms division, explained that the HiPath 8000 is technology that comes from the carrier side of Siemens’ business, running on a hardened Linux platform on an IBM 3546 xSeries server. In its current form, it scales up to 100,000 users on a single system.

To take it into the enterprise market as an IP PBX, he explained, the Munich-based group is adding an appropriate feature set (functions such as voicemail and conference calls, for instance) as well as developing the downsized version for release in December. The challenges of downsizing from carrier to enterprise grade, said Northend, are to come up with a product at the right price point, which means porting the software onto a non-resilient platform (since resilience equals cost) and then “seeing how much of the software we can put onto a single instance so, for instance, we’ll need to put voicemail on the same server,” he explained.

At the same time, Siemens is developing a larger version of HiPath 2000, a multi-function device that combines voice switching, voicemail, a four-port Ethernet switch, DSL router, firewall/VPN, PSTN connectivity and a WLAN controller for Siemens’ own access points (the technology it acquired when it bought Chantry). At the moment that box targets environments of between 10 and 30 users, but the plan is to increase it to be able to support up to around 300. “We’ll also be adding in more functionality to that larger device, such as call center support, presence, conferencing, and security functions such as anti-virus, anti-spam and so on,” said Northend.

The idea, then, is to address contiguous but different markets with the two products under development. On the one hand, there are enterprises with their own IT staff that will want their IP PBX functionality in a dedicated device like the 8000. On the other, smaller companies, many of whom won’t have IT departments, for whom the all-in-one-box approach of the 2000 should therefore be appealing. The cut-off point of around 300 users is clearly a notional one, but by and large Siemens expects it to be about right in defining the two types of customer.

A further extension of the IP telephony portfolio will come early next year, Northend went on, when the company makes generally available the BizIP product it announced at CeBIT in March. This is a SIP handset for environments of up to 16 users, with the functionality to obviate the need for a PBX altogether, with operations such as call forwarding and three-way conferencing all handled on the device itself. This peer-to-peer PBX technology is similar to what Siemens competitor Avaya bought last year when it acquired Canadian ISV Nimcat Networks, though that was really in the 50-user space, Avaya having announced the intention to take it further downmarket.

As for product differentiation vis-a-vis the competition, Northend said the claim to fame of the downsized 8000 will be the fact that it is native SIP, competing with both legacy circuit-switched PBXs and other IP PBXs running proprietary protocols rather than SIP. “In both these cases, the users face problems when trying to integrate the devices with enterprise apps such as ERP or CRM systems,” he began. “Even once the integration has been done, if there are any changes made to the enterprise app, you usually have to revisit the integration work all over again.”

As for the 2000, the competition falls into two categories. “There are the multi-service devices from the likes of Nortel, Avaya, Panasonic or Samsung, with cards for analog or digital, whereas ours is a pure IP device with SIP signalling,” where again the competitors will face challenges integrating into enterprise apps for likes like click-to-call or click-to-conference. Then there are the branch-in-a-box devices from the likes of Cisco (the ISR range), Juniper (the SSG portfolio) and NetDevices (the SG products). They too are multi-function, but their ethos is that of “voice-enabling routers” with the voice expertise of Siemens, Northend went on.

That is not to say, however, that Siemens is not also looking at putting VoIP capabilities onto a router. It does not make its own routers, of course, but it resells Juniper’s, so one option would be to ship the smarts from the 2000 on a router from the Sunnyvale, California-based company. “We are looking at the possibility of putting a VoIP blade on a router, though it’s currently a more distant development area,” said Northend, adding, however that, since the conglomerate is currently in talks with potential partners for a joint venture with the enterprise comms side of Siemens Communications (just as it has already struck with Nokia in carrier networking), the priority could change, depending on who Siemens partners with.