SIEMENS

Like many commuters, automotive engineer Jens Müller begins his day in a traffic jam. It takes him an hour to get from his home at Lake Starnberg to his office in Munich. “In such situations I really envy my colleague Marijke van Veen,” he says. That’s because commuting is a thing of the past for Marijke, who works for a design company in Amsterdam. She doesn’t have a fixed workstation. Instead, she goes to a smart work center, otherwise knowns as a co-working center. Such centers, which are either company-owned or privately-operated rental offices, can be found in many European cities. They offer cutting-edge equipment that enables colleagues to work together nationally or internationally. They also feature the requisite computer programs, as well as rooms for video conferences and facilities for joint work on 3D data. Marijke only has to travel 500 meters from her home to her current workplace. In fact, she often works from her home office as well, as long as video conferences with realtime presentations haven’t been scheduled.

“Work and home life are increasingly merging,” says Dr. Wilhelm Bauer from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering (IAO) regarding the trend toward a new culture of work. “But it depends very much on the available technology.” Ideally, the technology includes a network of fiber optic cables that can transmit data at a rate of one gigabit per second (Gbit/s) to the end user. Although VDSL and simple DSL connections achieve less than one tenth or one hundredth of this rate, they still suffice for many applications. In the future, however, it should be possible to achieve data transmission rates of several hundred megabits per second (Mbit/s) even with a mobile phone, which would allow users to hold high-resolution video conferences.v

Optimally Networked. Virtual offices primarily require networked computers, including smartphones and desktop devices, a highspeed transmission network, and state-of-theart IT security architecture. The German government therefore decided in 2009 that three fourths of the country’s households should have connections with transmission rates of at least 50 Mbit/s by 2014. This target will probably be achieved, since the Global IP Traffic Forecast published by Cisco Systems in June 2011 predicts that the average bandwidth will increase in Germany from 12 Mbit/s in 2010 to 46 Mbit/s in 2015. The South Korean capital, Seoul, has already achieved a rate of 100 Mbit/s, which it plans to increase to 1 Gbit/s by the end of 2012. Such a high transmission rate would allow movie fans to download films quickly from the Internet and would also enable professional users to work with high-resolution images in distance learning programs at universities, for example. Rates also need to be up to 1 Gbit/s to transmit high-resolution medical images or for industrial users to collaborate on virtual versions of new products.

Like other Asian countries, South Korea is adopting new technologies in record time. Although the iPhone wasn’t introduced to the country until 2009, South Korea’s 50 million inhabitants are expected to have 20 million smartphones by the end of the year. Smartphones and tablet PCs are now standard equipment for college students, enabling them to, for example, reserve a seat at a university library from home. This is made possible by an app that shows users which reading rooms have space available.

Germany’s cities are also doing well in comparison to many other places. Munich’s municipal utility company SWM, for example, plans to have fiber optic cables reach all of the 32,000 buildings within the area surrounded by the city’s inner beltway by 2013. That means 350,000 households, or half of the households in Munich.

“One fourth of Munich’s inhabitants already have access to transmission rates of up to 100 Mbit/s,” reports Dr. Jörg Ochs, who heads the utility’s Telecommunications unit, which is responsible for Fiber Optic Cable Access for Munich. “That makes us one of the fastest cities in Europe from a data transmission point of view.”

Engineers at BMW and at Siemens Corporate Research in Munich have long had such high transmission rates, since they need them for the development of virtual products online. “We’ve also installed redundant connections for many companies,” adds Ochs. “As a result, if one cable should malfunction, the second one can go into action immediately.”

“Although the telecommunications infrastructure is pretty good in Germany’s cities, rural areas still have some catching up to do,” says Bauer. People in rural areas in particular would benefit from high-performance networks. Many employees would be able to commute less often to work in cities. TheBavarian government has therefore announced that it will invest €100 million to promote faster fiber optic connections in the state’s municipalities. In thinly populated areas where fiber optic cables would be too expensive,mobile communications providers plan to create a far-reaching solution that would use the successor to UMTS: the LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard, which will make transmission rates of over 100 MBit/s possible.

However, this alone will not be enough to achieve a breakthrough for offices on the World Wide Web. “IT security is crucial whenever sensitive data is sent and stored on thirdparty servers,” explains Dr. Johann Fichtner, Head of IT Security at Siemens Corporate Technology. His teams are therefore developing encryption and input check technologies as well as a user rights management system that is almost impossible for hackers to crack.

Work processes are also set to become more flexible. For instance, by taking advantage of co-working centers, teams can spontaneously meet as project requirements develop, irrespective of their locations. In line with this approach, the new Siemens headquarters in Munich will feature the Siemens Office concept, which allows teams to meet online or in real life in state-of-the-art office zones whose size and equipment can be flexibly adjusted to meet changing needs (see “A Showpiece Takes Shape”).

It’s now September 25, 2015, and Jens Müller has booked a virtual meeting room for 10 a.m. Marijke van Veen is still sitting in the living room of her friend Christiane, who celebrated her birthday the night before. At today’s meeting the team will discuss a “facelift” for a small electric car. Marijke’s latest idea for the car’s interior is on her tablet and she’s all set to show it to her colleagues — but after a nightlong party, she wishes this meeting weren’t a video conference.