Networking giant 3Com
Corp. and German telecom giant Siemens AG Wednesday announced a joint
venture to develop network telephony and multimedia products.
Today’s announcement is an extension of a previous 18-month alliance. The
co-produced products are already under development and are slated for
availably in 1999. They will provide enterprises with local area network
services, including voice, video and data offerings.
The companies are jointly investing more than $100 million to start the
venture. The union is aimed at providing both firms with leadership
footholds in the emerging LAN telephony and gateway product market, which
analysts expect to grow to more than $4.1 billion by year 2002.
The co-venture calls for:
- Siemens call processing to handle telecommunications functionality and
interworking software to ensure compatibility with enterprises existing
telecommunications environments
- 3Com’s technology to be employed in a variety of networking solutions
across the enterprise
- Siemens to sell and market the venture worldwide and for 3Com to market
the services worldwide through affiliates in 160 countries.
Products include multimedia exchanges for voice and
data, LAN telephony gateways and ethernet phones and adapters packaged for
small, medium and large businesses.
Initial applications for these products include voice-enhanced PC
collaboration and conferencing, call centers for Internet-based retailers,
and customer service help desks.
The products will be marketed under the Siemens
HiNet and 3Com SuperStack II and CoreBuilder names. They will allow
business users to place and receive telephone calls
from their PCs or ethernet phones from wherever they connect to a corporate
network.
They can also share rich voice, video and data applications across the
network in real time. Data and multimedia files related to an incoming call
can also be retrieved instantly.
Siemens and 3Com said it will form a separate staff for the venture. The
initial staff will be comprised of 200 engineers from both companies.
“The joint venture brings together the best of breed talent, experience,
core technologies and distribution channels to create the industry’s
richest set of convergence products and deliver them worldwide ahead of our
competitors,” said Eric Benhamou, 3Com’s chairman and chief executive officer.
“Converged networking is the most exciting and fundamental change in
networking since the Internet itself.”
“Siemens will provide enterprise network customers with converged
voice/data network solutions combining advanced LAN technology from the
Ethernet
market leader 3Com with benefits customers know and value from their PBX:
feature-rich real-time communications and telco-class reliability,” said
Roland Koch, president of Siemens information and communication networks
group.
