IT EXPO Keynote: Siemens Communications Thomas Zimmerman

October 25, 2005

Siemens Communications President of Enterprise Systems Thomas Zimmerman Tuesday addressed the mobile enterprise during his keynote speech at IT EXPO.

According to Siemens research, 66 percent of enterprise employees will travel in 2006; 47 percent of U.S. corporations support telemarketing; and CIOs will spend 23 percent more on wireless networking.

"Enterprise is on everybody’s mind," Zimmerman said.

The major problem, however, is that there is a fragmented communications industry between cell, VPN, PSTN and WAN technologies.

The end result, according to Zimmerman, is that "[w]e are slaves to communications tools."

Zimmerman said that the solution the creation of preference-based communications that use collaborative technologies using Wi-Fi enabled devices such as PDAs, mobile phones, laptops, etc.

Siemens’ solution, LifeWorks, creates a presence enabled, preference-based, process integrated system.

To make his point, Zimmerman showed a video demo of Tim, a modern day executive Everyman, who takes advantage of such a collaborative domain.

Tim, whose wife is expecting any moment, is watching television in the morning when he receives a video phone call from a co-worker who’s freaking out over an emergency at the office.

Tim agrees to put the fire out, and gets picked up by a co-worker in a mini-van. While driving in the family truckster, Tim uses his laptop computer and HSDPA to download a critical file, set up a conference call and shares documents with members of his work team. When he makes it to the office and hooks into the company network.

What more could possibly happen to our beleaguered Tim? Yeah, his wife is short of breath and goes to the hospital. Tim takes his laptop and goes to the hospital to affectionately wait outside his wife’s room and work.

The doctor who is treating Tim’s wife uses a secure multifunctional bedside unit to show Tim’s wife his diagnosis (she’s fine). The doctor calls a nurse (because he can’t seem to open the door to talk to her directly) via voice over Wi-Fi to tell Tim that he can see his wife.