Siemens and SAP Join Forces to Accelerate Industrial Transformation

End-to-End Software  

* Together, industry leaders Siemens and SAP will deliver integrated end-to-end software solutions across product lifecycle, supply chain and asset management.

* Partnership leverages expertise and technology of both companies to provide a true digital thread that helps enterprises eliminate process and information siloes, drives digitalization and delivers a comprehensive solution for the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0).

* SAP will offer Siemens’ Teamcenter software as the core foundation for product lifecycle collaboration and product data management. Siemens will offer SAP® Intelligent Asset Management solutions and SAP Portfolio and Project Management applications to maximize business value for customers over the entire product and service lifecycle and enable new collaborative processes between manufacturers and operators.

Siemens and SAP SE has announced a new partnership that will leverage their industry expertise and bring together their complementary software solutions for product lifecycle, supply chain and asset management so their customers can deliver new innovation and collaborative business models that will accelerate industry transformation globally. Through this agreement, both SAP and Siemens will be able to complement and integrate their respective offerings in order to offer customers the first truly integrated and enhanced solutions for product lifecycle management (PLM), supply chain, service and asset management. This will enable customers to form a true digital thread integrating all virtual models and simulations of a product or asset with real-time business information, feedback and performance data over the entire lifecycle.

"Digital transformation will be critical for the manufacturing industries to increase productivity, flexibility and accelerate innovation, so companies must come together in new ways to enable the digital enterprise,” said Klaus Helmrich, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries. “This exciting collaboration between two industry leaders is about more than just interoperability and interfaces; it is about creating a truly integrated digital thread that unites product and asset lifecycle management with the business that enables customers to optimize production of products.”

Silos between engineering and business have existed in enterprises for decades. This new partnership will help customers to break down these siloes so manufacturers, product design teams and service managers have the information needed to quickly create and manage customer-centric product and service offerings.

“As manufacturers design and deliver smarter products and assets, access to real-time business information across networks is critical to bring new and improved innovations to market faster,” said Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and responsible for SAP Product Engineering. “Bringing together expertise from SAP and Siemens to offer Industry 4.0-enabled business processes allows enterprises to create a digital thread for the entire product and asset lifecycle. With this end-to-end solution, teams across the business network can efficiently work together to design and deliver innovative products productively, profitably and sustainably.”

Going forward, both SAP and Siemens will be able to offer new solutions that combine their technologies in order to help companies shorten time to market by leveraging Industry 4.0-enabled data using intelligent assets and products. This will also give organizations the benefit of incorporating customer insights into product development through a comprehensive solution, from product design to service and asset management. As a first step in the partnership, SAP will offer Siemens’ Teamcenter®  software as the core foundation for product lifecycle collaboration and data management and Siemens will offer SAP® Intelligent Asset Management and SAP Portfolio and Project Management software to maximize the business value for manufacturers and operators across networks. Both companies will collaborate to develop applications from an end-to-end lifecycle perspective to help customers achieve a seamless digital thread that improves overall business performance.

“Combining Siemens’ Teamcenter and SAP S/4HANA® software provides companies an end-to-end process capability from product design to decommission,” said Bob Parker, Senior VP of Industry Research at IDC. “The IT benefits of pre-integration of PLM, ERP, asset management and supply chain applications and the business benefits from having a more resilient response to changing market demand make this a compelling consideration for companies seeking a competitive advantage in the digital economy.”

Zendesk Commended by Frost & Sullivan for Its Customer-focused Sales Force Automation Solution

Based on its recent analysis of the North American small and mid-sized business (SMB) mobile worker apps market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Zendesk with the 2020 North American Product Leadership Award for its Sell sales force automation (SFA) solution. The solution stands out for its ease of use, affordable pricing, creative bundling, ongoing support, and emphasis on the customer experience.

“Zendesk Sell is tailored to the needs of SMBs and offers a tiered selection of capabilities. Unlike legacy sales management tools, it supports an omnichannel strategy; provides an easy-to-use, mobile-first experience; and prioritizes integration with both internal company systems and external services,” said Jeanine Sterling, Frost & Sullivan Industry Director. “Significantly, Zendesk is able to leverage the product usage data from over 40,000 Zendesk customers and combine it with information from its Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report for well-rounded insights regarding customer needs.”

Zendesk Sell is available as a standalone offering and as a part of a competitively priced bundle called the Sales Suite. This bundle includes the Zendesk Sell, Chat, Reach, and Voice, which are core tools used by sales representatives to prospect, communicate, and sell. Zendesk Sell is available in a cloud-based as-a-service format, and its subscription pricing model makes it affordable to smaller businesses and allows customers to scale the solution easily.

The company is looking to make the most of its rising brand awareness with creative go-to-market strategies that target existing Zendesk users that need SFA software and value the integration of Sell with other Zendesk products and that target new prospects that are searching for SFA software that is powerful yet easy to use and affordable. These two strategies can potentially tap customer segments that are new to SFA and either seeking to upgrade to a more advanced SFA or replace a legacy or homegrown product.

“The SMB mobile worker applications sector is expected to continue growing, and mobilized SFA solutions, such as Sell, will be key contributors to this trend. The company also continues to forge technology and reseller partnerships, thereby building an ecosystem of apps and alternate channels that open up new global markets,” noted Sterling. “As Zendesk expands into the enterprise sector, its Sell offering and tiered plans will continue to offer SMBs flexibility, scalability, integrations, and the capabilities that smaller businesses need to succeed.”

Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality that is gaining rapid market acceptance. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analyses, and extensive secondary research to identify best practices in the industry.

India's EDA industry growing at 30pc annually

Globally, India is amongst the fastest growing markets for EDA tools, along with USA and China. With the EDA market growing here at about 30 percent annually, Hewlett Packard, a leading EDA high performance computing platform solutions provider, is targeting the fast growing chip design centers in India.
On this occasion of the HP Intel Asia-Pacific EDA seminar, Brain Lowe, Alliance Marketing Manager of HP (Cupertino) with Faisal M. Paul, Country Manager (India) – HPC & OSLO of HP (India), spoke to Manu Sharma of CIOL Bureau the on various aspects of the EDA industry. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is EDA and what is its importance?
Brian Lowe: Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is the category of tools for designing and producing electronic systems ranging from printed circuit boards (PCBs) to integrated circuits (ICs). This is sometimes referred to as ECAD (electronic computer-aided design) or just CAD.
EDA is specifically for electronics, and concentrates on EDA used for designing integrated circuits. As chips grow larger and become more complex to design EDA becomes much more important at semiconductor companies.

CIOL: What are the trends in EDA?
BL: EDA computing complexity and very complex chip designs put heavy demands on computing resources such as CPU MIPS and memory. In addition, there is a need for reliable, scalable storage because of the huge chip design database.
There is also a need for setting up data centers and global grid that allow designers to tap into compute servers worldwide. This will allow the compute infrastructure to utilized very efficiently. Besides, this allows the designers and the company to scale the compute resources during various phases of a project.
There is also need to optimize data center design such as power, cooling, floor space, etc., and HP's HPC clustering technologies and blades fit the bill.

CIOL: What is HP's role in the EDA industry?
BL: Electronic product development organizations are constantly challenged to deliver advanced technology to market in less time. HP's focuses on inventiveness creates innovative high-performance technical computing solutions that allow design teams to maximize their EDA productivity.
HP has architected their technical computing solutions to make large memory capacity affordable. This allows engineers to synthesize and simulate larger sections of their designs, thereby maximizing designer productivity.

CIOL: Who is HP targeting in India and why?
Faisal M. Paul: HP provides leadership and innovation in high-performance computing (HPC) solutions for customer EDA design environments. For HP, India is among the fastest growing markets with many chip design firms setting up units in India. We are growing here at 30 percent at par with the USA and China.
HP partners with leading EDA software vendors to leverage HP's internal EDA design expertise and provide direction to HP R&D product groups.

CIOL: What does HP feel about the growing chip design industry in India?
FP: Chips have automated our lives with gizmos and designing this has been a good business proposition for Indian technology firms.
Without any hesitation, we can say that we are among the largest system integration vendors for EDA across the globe. We offer a broad range of Linux-based systems – workstations, servers and blades, together with leading edge IT data center solutions for the design environment.

CIOL: What is HP's innovation in EDA?
BL: As one of the world's largest electronic, R&D, design and manufacturing companies, HP has found innovative ways to employ technologies to address the pressures found in EDA design environments.
In fact, HP was one of the first computer vendors to embrace Linux as a practical and cost-effective alternative to proprietary solutions, including support for a myriad of EDA applications, across a wide range of platforms and flexible clustering solutions.

CIOL: Where does HP's C-class blade role come in?
BL: The HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure is said to feature the world's fastest midplane at 5TBps of aggregate throughput and the first midplane to support 4X DDR InfiniBand, the industry's fastest blade server interconnect, which delivers up to 20GBps bandwidth in each direction especially meant for high performance computing for the chip design companies.

CIOL: Where does HP stand in the blade industry today?
BL: Following the introduction of HP C Class blade for high-performance computing during the third quarter of 2006, HP has outperformed all competitors with 85 percent growth. We are at the No. 1 position according to IDC Server tracker in Q4- 2006 in x86 Blades report, followed by IBM and Dell.

CIOL: How does the chip design automation in India look like?
FP: The Indian product market has already crossed the $1 billion mark. The chip automated our lives with electronic gizmos and has been a good business proposition for Indian technology firms. Now, we are moving towards the next step, designing tools that automate the chip designing process itself.
This growth is likely to accelerate with more players entering the fray in the coming years as electronics consumption goes up significantly.
At present, there are about seven major EDA companies, both multinational and Indian, operating in the country. Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Magma, Synopsys, Circuit Sutra, Sequence Design and SoftJin are all reporting growth. The India Semiconductor Association (ISA) expects more domestic players to start providing EDA tools to chip designers.