Many of the greatest inventors and scientists of the past two centuries tested their inventions and theories right in their own backyards. So why should it be any different for communications technology vendors?

And what better way to validate your solutions than to deploy them across your own organization and have someone independently test them?

To demonstrate the rapid return on investment from its OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) Server solution, Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) in 2007 deployed the solution across its 21 offices and connecting more than 1,900 employees (including some 500 home-based teleworkers) and, several months later, hired the independent advisory firm Mainstay Partners to conduct a study on the cost savings that could be realized as a result of the deployment.

Bottom line: The study revealed that Siemens (News - Alert) could realize tangible business benefits totaling up to $18.7 million over five years, and additional indirect benefits of up to $16.8 million, from the deployment of its own UC solution.

Factoring in the project’s (market) cost of about $5.7 million, the company’s OpenScape investment was estimated to generate a return on investment (ROI) of 145 percent within 24 months.

Among the measurable benefits, the study estimated that Siemens could cut move-add-change (MAC) costs by up to 70 percent using the OpenScape UC system, which sports a Web-based administrative interface enabling user-friendly centralized management. Mainstay determined that the average employee moves about two times a year, costing the company on average about $100 per move. The study estimated that Siemens could save up to $1.2 million over five years from the simplification of MACs afforded through OpenScape’s centralized management.

Although the indirect productivity benefits of UC were harder to quantify, Mainstay estimated that the OpenScape solution reduced the amount of time Siemens employees spend doing email and other communications by as much as 40 percent – or 20 minutes a day. This became evident right after the solution was deployed, as managers and department heads began reporting noticeable improvements in employee productivity almost immediately.

One of the main productivity enhancing features delivered by OpenScape UC is “presence,” or the ability to see the availability status of others on the network. With presence, all a user has to do is look at a list of contacts and see who is available. Then they can click on the name of the person who is active to contact them using the medium of choice: phone, email, text and, if enabled, desktop video, etc. With “presence,” workers enjoy more efficient communications and spend less time tracking down colleagues. For example, if a user on the network is only available via cell phone, then he or she can set the system so that all calls are automatically routed to their cell number instead of their desk phone. Even more impressively, a user can set the system so that only calls from certain users dial through, while all others are automatically routed to voicemail.

Also generating cost savings, the study found, is OpenScape’s ability to centrally track communications costs for all workers, including home-based workers. As a result, employees no longer need to submit expense reports for communications charges -- potentially cutting Siemens’ labor costs by up to $1.2 million over five years.

The study also revealed that, thanks to OpenScape’s software-based architecture, Siemens could reap savings by slimming down its communications hardware at local offices. The upgrade for these offices came at a lower expense because there was no need to deploy new PBXs or architecture.

The study also determined that Siemens could save an estimated $510,000 per year, or $2.55 million over five years, on IT maintenance as a result of migrating from its current managed services group and local PBX (News - Alert) infrastructure to the more reliable and flexible OpenScape platform. The specific advantage for Siemens is that the migration freed up its managed services resources to provide higher value services such as network monitoring and security, while maintaining a more consolidated IT infrastructure (i.e. it increased network capacity).

The study also analyzed the future operational efficiencies that could be realized as Siemens expands its use of the system. As of the study’s publication, Siemens was reportedly preparing to extend the platform to its call center operations in order to facilitate real-time collaboration with customers. It was also looking at integrating business applications into the OpenScape environment, for example, by adding new communication power to its existing customer relationship management solution and enhancing its outbound marketing and customer service programs.

What’s more, the company plans to further leverage the integration of OpenScape with collaboration tools -- possibly including Microsoft’s (News - Alert) Office Communication suite -- to develop a “rich workroom” where document collaboration, voice, and video can be streamed to a worker’s desktop.

Siemens Enterprise Communications will also be exploring platform’s capabilities in terms of building communications enabled business processes (CEBP), which involves embedding rich communications and collaboration into the company’s daily workflows. For example, by integrating OpenScape into its service-management process, the company’s product-support engineers could solve trouble tickets faster by collaborating in real time with the customer’s IT managers and Siemens’ field technicians.

Siemens Enterprise Communications also hopes to use OpenScape to automate and enhance its ITIL-based service packages, allowing users to share electronic documents in real time and hold virtual conferences featuring video and desktop sharing capabilities.

Siemens executives say they expect OpenScape will continue to improve the way the company works with its customers, vendors, employees and investors well into the future. They anticipate that OpenScape UC solution will continue to help improve the way the company collaborates with partners, customers and prospects, while at the same time reducing operational costs.

Earlier this year Siemens Enterprise Communications announced availability of its new OpenScale Professional Service and Integration Solutions that are designed to work in conjunction with the company’s OpenScape UC application. These new solutions facilitate integration of UC technologies with existing business applications. They build on Siemens’ OpenSOA approach, which allows for deep business process integration into virtually any existing line of business application. Customers can choose different levels of integration from a suite of professional services and integration solutions that have fixed prices.

The company also recently introduced OpenScape Xpressions, a pre-packaged, easy-to-deploy UC solution is designed to facilitate integration into multivendor environments, including most mainstream PBXs.

More recently, Siemens Enterprise Communications made news when it announced that its networking division, Enterasys (News - Alert), had deployed a secure IP network infrastructure for the Franciscan University of Steubenville. The university will use Siemens’ communications solutions to connect more than 22 buildings, 2,500 users and 4,000 devices on campuses in Steubenville, Ohio and Gaming, Austria. It also recently announced a new tie up with the SYNNEX network of technology resellers.