Siemens

 
Siemens is implementing the Microsoft® Windows® 2000 platform on most of its 2,000 servers and 227,000 workstations because they believe it’s the best way to attain their vision of access for any employee or affiliate, anywhere, anytime, and to any resource.

Company Profile
A Munich, Germany-based electronics firm that just celebrated its 150th anniversary, Siemens has over 400,000 employees in 130 operating units worldwide. Siemens markets a range of products, including computers, digital medical equipment, light rail transportation components, light bulbs, household appliances, and more. Once migration to Microsoft® Windows® 2000 is complete, Siemens will be running the operating system on more than 2,000 servers and 227,000 workstations.

A 150-year-old firm reaches that age by being flexible enough to adapt to changing market conditions. Siemens used to prize the independence of the 130 groups in its global network, but today, decentralization has become a potential liability. "We have 130 different groups, regions, and operating companies," says John Minnick, Manager of Technology Development, Corporate IS for Siemens Energy and Automation, Inc. "The business will run much more efficiently with common infrastructure, tools, and procedures."

Implementing the Siemens Any4 Vision
Siemens developed a vision of a world standard that balances the benefits of being global with the needs of individual operating groups. Given the catch phrase "anyone, anywhere, anytime, any resource," dubbed Any4, their vision entailed providing personnel, vendors, suppliers, distributors, partners, and others with easy access to resources, from any location.

Minnick says the company is ecstatic about using Windows 2000 to achieve the Any4 vision. "There has never been an operating system that addresses our vision," says Minnick. "To achieve (it), you had better make sure your system is robust enough to handle 10 million objects and so many thousands of transactions per hour. You need a delegated security administration model. This is what Windows 2000 has brought us. By providing this platform on both the server and client side, we’ll realize the Any4 vision and maintain our competitive advantage."

Active Directory Domain Provides the Global Backbone
According to Minnick, Siemens was looking for directory services as well as a common domain name server approach and integration of its large networks. "With the Windows 2000 Active Directory service feature, it is now possible to incorporate all networks into one global directory concept for an unequivocal Siemens-wide addressing scheme," says Minnick. The unified view of the network simplifies access and management, and enables security integration based on public-key cryptography, a critical concern for Siemens.

Siemens is implementing its vision using a single domain "forest" within the Active Directory^TM service. All domain "trees" in a forest share a common schema, configuration, and global catalog, but are also customizable for separate organizations. Since Active Directory accommodates more objects, "you can have more accounts per domain controller," Minnick says. "This lets us consolidate the number of domains and servers pretty dramatically."

This design helps resolve IT challenges resulting from acquisitions and reorganizations. "Siemens has about 200 acquisitions on the table at any one time," Minnick says. "During an acquisition, if you can upgrade the network in a cookie-cutter fashion, you can skip many steps and improve the quality of the migration at the same time." Standardizing with Windows 2000 allows Siemens to achieve two primary goals—to reduce administrative effort and eliminate redundant work. "You eliminate a lot of the 'reinventing the wheel' processes that many large corporations go through," says Minnick.

Windows 2000: a unified vision for global solutions.