Over the next three years, Siemens will hand over operation of its IT infrastructure for all its units and regions to Siemens Business Services (SBS). Thanks to this initiative, Siemens hopes to reduce its IT costs by hundreds of millions of euros. The IT subsidiary will in turn benefit from an additional business volume worth several hundred millions of euros annually. The project was launched at the start of 2005 at two Operating Groups: Logistics and Assembly Systems (L&A) and Transportation Systems (TS). SBS is now operating the complete IT systems including the networks, computer centers, desktops and telephone systems for these Operating Groups. Plans are being made to include Siemens VDO Automotive.

Until recently, each Siemens Group had its own IT infrastructure resources and special IT landscape. Siemens launched a central project in 2002 to take account of the increasing standardization and growth in IT requirements and to put a cap on investment, maintenance and upgrade costs. After the first successful results, with harmonisation and greater efficiency, which included the introduction of standardised 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 Siemens Business Services will undertake the task jointly. The CIO Corporate Center will establish the targets of a corporate-wide process and IT landscape, define the IT standards, and will design and enforce a globally binding service catalogue and service level agreements. Siemens Business Services will provide the infrastructure services based on these Service Level Agreements concluded with CIO.

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