So what's so wrong with CLOSED communications?
One question the analysts are asking about Siemens' open communications positioning is: "So, really, what's so wrong with CLOSED communications?"
The argument against Siemens' 'open' positioning goes like this. We've been living with proprietary ICT systems for years. Microsoft Office is a proprietary software suite and is massively popular. SAP doesn't go out of its way to integrate with other ERP systems. Some of Siemens' telephony rivals provide IP-only solutions, they don't even try to accommodate previous technologies or other systems. So where's the clear advantage of an open model, even in communications? As it is an important challenge to answer, the thing to ask is, what do customers really want from communications anyway?
Yes, ultimately customers want to make lots of profit. But to support them in doing this, customers expect communications to cost-effectively knit together the organisation's many and varied functions into excellent processes. (How many things can you do in your organisation without picking up the telephone or speaking to someone?) More than this, customers want communications to be flexible enough to change when required.
There are two necessary conditions to achieve these two fairly simple objectives. The first is for the organisation to have 'best, no compromise' ways of achieving individual, isolated activities. The second necessary condition is for the enterprise to be able to combine and integrate these activities in a way that creates excellent business value.
In order to have 'no compromise' activities, the organisation needs to buy the best ICT solutions to support a specific need. To use an example, the enterprise needs to buy the word processing application with the best, easiest-to-use functionality.
In order to be able to integrate these point applications excellently, it needs to buy solutions that work well together... But of course this is where the problem starts. Closed, proprietary point solutions don't integrate well (by definition). Knowing this, most organisations then compromise. Instead of buying the best word processing package, and the best spreadsheet, and so on, they buy the best Office Suite: a group of applications designed to work well together.
Let's bring it closer to home. Customers buy a communications system not just for its functionality, but because they believe that it integrates well with other software (e.g. it is part of an application suite). They may also believe that the solution integrates better with underlying network infrastructure from the same company. Call this a 'solutions suite': it's not just about applications, but how everything integrates to create value.
The solution suite, any closed solution suite cannot cover all activities needed by a process. At the edge, the solution again needs to integrate with someone else's systems.
To summarise, with a closed communications system, even though the customer has compromised on ultimate quality of isolated applications, has still not been able to avoid expensive customisation. It still needs to join up the silos. Analyst groups should agree on this: most say that integration is high up on spending priorities.
So how is Open Communications different? It's a concept based on standards, increasing the likelihood of being able to integrate. That's a core part of its appeal. So why haven't we all gone 'open source'? Aren't such collaborative systems the acme of openness?
The answer is that open sourced, standards-based applications are function-poor: the sponsors make their money from adding functionality at the top end and of course charging for integration and associated professional services.
The dream for customers, surely, is to get a thought-through, no-compromise, full function solution that is based deep-down on standards (such as SOA), to make integration easy. And they want something that's flexible: that will integrate new activities and functions and applications as they come along in the future. That's not open source and is definitely not closed, proprietary. That's Open Communications.
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