Corporate Technology - Rolf Hellinger

Software & Engineering
Siemens invests nearly €2 billion a year in software and employs
some 20,000 software developers to drive crucial innovations all
over the world. At Corporate Technology’s Software and Engineering
(CT SE) team, 275 experts are involved in developing new processes,
methods and tools, as well as providing project management
and consulting services to improve the quality and capabilities
of Siemens’ software products. CT SE specialists are located in
Munich, Erlangen, Bangalore, Beijing, Moscow, and Princeton.
The Invisible Foundation
of Business Success
It’s weightless, invisible, and flexible. It ships
anywhere in seconds, consumes no resources,
and can give virtually any product a
unique identity — in the office, in production
environments, and at home. It’s software, and
at Siemens it has become an essential ingredient
in the corporate formula for success.
To an ever increasing extent, practically
everything — from power plants to production
lines and medical technology — will be governed
by software. Software is also causing farreaching
changes in traditional disciplines such
as engineering, where It supports the entire
value chain, from design to production planning,
and from the development of new user interfaces
to the implementation of advanced
maintenance services.
Software is finding its way into all kinds of applications.
At Siemens’ Pervasive Computing
Lab, for instance, researchers are testing proces-
18 Corporate Technology
sors and sensors that are embedded in everyday
items together with their software — whether
it’s in lighting, air conditioning systems, window
blinds or washing machines. Researchers want
to determine whether the use of these devices is
feasible in environments that are fully networked
and always online. The vision of Pervasive
Computing developed by CT SE provides answers
to questions such as what the energy
management of, or communication among,
networked systems should look like, and how to
provide such systems with a high degree of dependability
and robustness.
The Smart Home Lab provides an ideal setting
for investigating how users will interact
with tomorrow’s pervasive and highly integrated
information systems. Researchers are
also trying to find out how such systems can
save resources by exchanging information and
how they can lead to the automation of many
functions in the area of building technology —
and eventually to the smart, real-time, networked
management of entire cities. So comprehensive
is this vision that it includes the integration
of data from public transit systems,
power plants, decentralized energy supply systems,
and the healthcare sector. For example, in
the future, traffic lights might be linked to traffic
flow information through real time data exchanges
with electric vehicles and recharging
stations. Local recharging stations, on the other
hand, would ask decentralized energy providers
how much energy each one of them was able to
deliver. The objective in such urban applications
would be to optimally manage available resources
through IT systems.
In hospitals and factories today the information
technology landscape is often built up from
a range of different vendor-supplied applications,
including some programs developed inhouse,
and numerous databases — a combination
that is far from being optimally coordinated.
Working in parallel are various coexisting systems
with different life cycles and product versions,
client-server applications and Web-based
technologies that are often incompatible and offer
redundant functions. Getting all these applications
and their data sets to work together can
be complex and expensive.
How can these challenges be overcome with
a view to creating an IT environment in which
the components of all applications are seamlessly
integrated? One way would be to create
uniform interfaces between components on the
basis of open standards. The advantages of this