In all of the Siemens sectors, Industry, Energy, and Healthcare, embedded systems are an essential part of our products, systems, and solutions. Also, in general, embedded systems and software-based systems surround us. This fits also well to the motto of this year's COMPSAC "The computed world: software beyond the digital society". There is a strong trend that embedded systems are being networked together and interact with each other in increasingly complex ways. Especially when there is a strong focus on the interaction between the elements, one speaks of "cyber-physical systems" or the "internet of things". The trend to increased use of cyber-physical systems offers new opportunities, both in the research space as well as for new applications. This keynote will provide insights into how Siemens has been active in both of these areas.

Siemens is a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering, operating in the sectors industry, energy and healthcare. Siemens holds leading market positions in all its business areas. The degree of innovation and the market success is significantly driven by software being an inherent element of most of the products. This makes Siemens one of the world's largest software companies. Only with systematic reuse Siemens is able to keep its market position for software intensive products. Therefore the company on the one hand invests in research activities and on the other hand top level management actively supports platform initiatives for exploiting reuse potential across different business units.

For many companies, including leaders in software development, software is becoming an increasingly critical competitive factor. For example, at Siemens, sixty percent of our business is strongly influenced by software and approximately fifty percent of all Siemens patents are software related. With more than 30,000 software developers worldwide and an expenditure of more than 3 billion Euros, Siemens is playing in the 'Champions League' of the world's leading software companies. But this fact is not well known because most of the software developed at Siemens is embedded. It's embedded in the products and solutions sold to customers, such as medical devices, automation controls, trains, automotive components, and even power plants. Yet a major part of the functionality of these products and solutions is defined by software.Because of the high cost of developing software, and because of its extraordinarily high business impact, optimizing the software development process has become a top priority at Siemens.