December 28, 2000, 9:29 AM — LAS VEGAS -- Siemens at the Networld+Interop conference Monday took the wraps off 21 products centered around its HiPath Enterprise Convergence Architecture and IP technology, all intended to help make IP technology accessible and useful for businesses.
The HiPath strategy, announced in February, is focused on giving users a "real world" option for deploying IP communications technology while keeping existing infrastructure, officials said.
"To us, HiPath is about business over IP -- customers getting valuable business results by using this technology," said George Nolen, president and CEO of Siemens' USA enterprise networks.
Siemens' new products, which include six IP products making a debut in the United States, are centered around four areas: evolving circuit-switch technology to leverage IP, making IP technology more feature-rich, common applications that work across any network infrastructure, and mobile technologies.
For enterprise environments Siemens unveiled the HiPath Ipadapter to turn optiset office cell phones into IP telephones, an IP-based switching feature called HiPath HG 3800 that extends Hicom switching to dark fiber and Ethernet distributed shelves, and the latest version of Siemens' HDMS (Hicom Domain Management Service), with a fault-management application that watches over network servers' status. Siemens also detailed its Hicom 300 H HIP-enabled communications server for large enterprises.
Siemens launched two IP phones, the SIP-protocol optiPoint 100 Advance and the H.323-compliant optiPoint 300 Basic, which was introduced outside the U.S. earlier this year along with the HiPath RG2500 IP gateway. The company also debuted its IP-based communications system, the HiPath 5500, which fits into Siemens' migration plans for porting circuit-switched enterprise applications across networks.
"This is really a proof point for what we want HiPath to be -- an open, distributed architecture," said Nolen, adding that customers want to be able to distribute applications without having to rebuild them each time.
To migrate its Hicom 150 customers to IP technology, Siemens outlined a strategy that includes the Hicom 150H communications server, with support for IP networking and application integration. Also part of the migration strategy is HiPath AllServe 150, an IP-distributed Windows application package that works with a HiPath HG 1500 integrated gateway allowing networked remote offices to share enterprise applications and administer them as if they were a single site. Siemens showed off a rack-mountable IP communications server called HiPath 5300 that will be targeted at smaller enterprises and remote offices.
Nolen said mobile and wireless technologies will play a large part in Siemens' future, especially as workers become more dispersed and work outside the office more often.
"In the next two to three years, there are going to be more wireless ports than wired ports in the world," added Nolen. "Cell phones are becoming an office with all the features of an office available around the world, and we are seeing the beginnings of this in the United States."
For those seeking a telephone-computer connection while out of the office, Siemens took the wraps off its optiClient 330, an all-IP soft-phone with a handset so that workers away from a phone can place calls through their laptops. The company touted additions to its Xpressions unified messaging family, including version two of Xpreessions 470, which updates the telephony and e-mail interfaces with features such as message attachment identification for phone access to mail. A version for smaller offices, Xpressions 471, was also unveiled.
Siemens also is creating tools for personalizing interactive Internet media content and application composer toolkits. Developers will see enterprise applications that can run in mixed network environments. An Ethernet-powered IP phone, created in partnership with PowerDsine, and a customizable IP-based workflow application are also in the works.
