Siemens Enterprise Communications unveiled Project Ansible, a dynamic unified communications and collaboration platform that is hosted in the cloud.
The new platform, which was developed in collaboration with frog, features a modern interface that brings together voice, video, social communications, search, business process applications, and other channels on a desktop, notebook, tablet or smartphone.
The company said its goal with Project Ansible is to present a “single pane of glass” providing visibility across a workgroup, an enterprise and the Web at the same time. Project Ansible is designed to pull together and manage the daily flow of communications into rich and meaningful conversations in an intelligent, intuitive and personalized way. It will offer advanced search capabilities within communication and collaboration applications, including transcribed voicemails, emails, social aggregated content, text messages, and beyond. Siemens Enterprise Communications terms this concept “Thought Trails” — where users have real-time, searchable access to the content they need by topic and conversation.
“Project Ansible is designed to address core challenges faced by so many organizations today: enterprises are at the center of a complex web of interconnected systems that are hard to manage; companies are failing to drive the full value of those investments; and, while communications tools increasingly play a more central role in business, the user experience is broken,” said Hamid Akhavan, CEO of Siemens Enterprise Communications.
Siemens Enterprise Communications will offer the solution as a white label UC solution that could be hosted by telcos or cloud providers. Large enterprises could host the platform in their own data centers. Siemens Enterprise Communications may also host the platform in its facilities for special clients.
Enterprise security is a top concern, stated Torsten Raak, Head of Corporate Marketing for Siemens Enterprise Communications. Encryption is provided end-to-end, including 256-bit SSL VPNs on the transport side and 256-bit AES for storage. Users are provided the option of deactivating the features that create a “thought trail”across integrated voice, email, chat and other applications. Moreover, enterprise could choose the specific geographic location to host the UC platform, thereby conforming to online privacy directives.
Project Ansible is expected to begin limited customer trials at the end of 2013 and be generally available later in 2014. The company said it is working to ensure interoperability with leading on-premise PBX vendors. Its own systems will support many of the advanced features.
