Over the next three years, Siemens will hand over the
operation of its IT infrastructure for all its units and regions to
Siemens Business Services (SBS).
The aims is to reduce Siemens’ IT costs by hundreds of millions
of euros. The IT subsidiary will in turn benefit from extra
business worth several hundred millions of euros annually.
Siemens CEO Klaus Kleinfeld said, "It will enable us to optimise
the information and communications structure within the company,
which is essential to our competitiveness and innovative strength.
Harmonising and standardising IT is a key lever. At the same time
it strengthens the position of our IT subsidiary in the
international outsourcing market."
The project was launched at the start of this year at two
operating groups: logistics and assembly, and transportation. SBS
is now operating all IT systems including the networks, computer
centres, desktops and phone systems for the groups, and plans are
under way to include the VDO automotive group.
Until recently, each Siemens group had its own IT infrastructure
resources and its own “IT landscape”.
Siemens launched a project in 2002 to take account of increasing
standardisation and growth in IT requirements and to put a cap on
investment, maintenance and upgrade costs.
After achieving harmonisation and greater efficiency – including
the introduction of standard web platforms – the next stage is to
uniformly organise and operate the complete IT infrastructure as
part of a shared services approach.
Siemens CIO and SBS will undertake the task jointly. The CIO
corporate centre will establish the targets of a corporate-wide
process and IT landscape, define IT standards, and design and
enforce a globally binding service catalogue and service level
agreements.
SBS will provide the infrastructure services based on the
service level agreements concluded with Siemens CIO.
“Product-oriented groups in Siemens see infrastructure services
purely as support processes,” said Kleinfeld. “For SBS, however,
this area is a core business. Our IT subsidiary already operates
around half of the company-wide IT infrastructure. The next logical
step was to bundle responsibility for the IT services there
too.”