Stodden on SBS strategy

Paul Stodden, chief executive of Siemens, talks to PC Dealer.

Where does IT Services (ITS) fit into the equation?

ealer. ITS is the infrastructure service provider for ICP and for SBS. It is the only service provider to ICP.

With SBS, ITS' approach is to capture market opportunities in the service chain, so it is going for very large system integration activities and business process outsourcing in five vertical markets. In those situations, we team up with SBS and act as a subcontractor to provide operational and infrastructure services.

With ICN, we do not have any sort of direct integration. ICN deals a lot with voice and analogue networks and ITS basically has no capabilities in those areas.

Is ITS leveraging Siemens' existing customer base to grow its business?

It is a good strategy to look after your existing customer base and we want our service teams to get a bigger share of our existing customers' budgets.

Do you utilise external channels to help provide services?

We partner with large organisations to provide key service deliveries to our customers where we have insufficient coverage. We also partner with independent companies which are resellers and partners of our computer systems group, but here the partnership is very different because these companies often have their own service organisations. Instead, we provide complementary services that give them extra scope, such as coverage outside of their geographies and additional service offerings.

But you also have a direct sales force. How do you avoid conflict with your channel?

Our aim is to sell our services directly to large accounts. There is potential for conflict with some of our larger resellers, like CompuNet in Germany and Computacenter. But dealing with Vars is part of our strategy for the computer systems group, and if resellers in that area want to provide the services to their existing large account customers we will not interfere. However, Vars will only be involved where they have those existing relationships. In the small and medium enterprise accounts, ITS will only support Vars when they request it.