Forrester Case Study: How Siemens Reinvented Its Business Model for the Digital Age

# Key Trends

# Siemens Xcelerator

# Digital Transformation

# Digital Manufacturing

Learn how Siemens shifted from selling products to building ecosystems - accelerating customer transformation at global scale.

September 11, 2025

This case study report was originally published by Forrester and authored by Dr. Bernhard Schaffrik along with three contributing writers.

Wanted: Digital Transformation Success For Siemens Customers

Back in 2018, when the idea for Siemens’ Xcelerator platform was shaped, many of Siemens’ SMB clients were struggling with their digital transformation projects. At Siemens, a project team under the leadership of Roland Busch, now president and CEO of Siemens, was formed to investigate the root causes of its clients’ digital transformation project failures. The Siemens Xcelerator team found that their customers (see Figure 1):

Struggled with the complexity of legacy systems. These prevented them from transforming successfully.

Didn’t know where to start because of the vast number of isolated products. These ranged from automation software to IoT platforms to digital twins and many more.

Weren’t able to identify the right digital transformation implementation partners. They needed partners that understood both the Siemens product portfolio and their own industry in depth. They also struggled to discover Siemens partners that could complement Siemens products with their own, industry-specific products.

Preferred online purchasing to physical sales or a mix personal and digital encounters. Back then, Siemens’ e-commerce capabilities were limited. In addition, buying patterns hadn’t only shifted from personal to digital but also from individual buyers to collaborative buying groups — and Siemens’ sales approach wasn’t ready to meet this shift in behavior.

The Solution: An Ecosystem For Digital Transformation Success

The root causes for digital transformation failure that the project team had identified were symptomatic of Siemens’ challenge: It was a product-centric manufacturing company that needed to become customer-centric. Roland Busch knew that Siemens had to transform into a customer- and solutions-centric technology company that could adapt more rapidly to customer demands and technology changes. To achieve this, he positioned the Siemens Xcelerator initiative as a vehicle for change, which followed a multistep approach.

Step 1: Siemens Creates A One-Stop Shop For Digital Transformation

“Throwing singular products at customers to create holistic solutions without any guidance was wishful thinking,” said Bettina prior to the launch of Siemens’ digital transformation program, Siemens Xcelerator. Based on this insight, its first step to evolve from product centricity to customer centricity was to build a superior online experience for buying groups. Siemens formed an advisory council — consisting of customers, partners, and developers — to ensure that the Siemens Xcelerator platform moved in the right direction and met client requirements. The initial version of Siemens Xcelerator provided:

An online buying experience. Siemens products were easily accessible and comparable through a curated portfolio, which included digital and IoT-enabled offerings from Siemens and its partner ecosystem.

Access to partners. Siemens’ huge partner ecosystem became directly accessible to buying groups online, making it easier to find and qualify the right partners and taking the burden off the shoulders of customers.

Help with assembling solutions. The platform gave buying groups guidance for assembling solutions with Siemens products and combining them with Siemens partner’s products and services that matched their specific digital transformation challenges.

Education and support. It offered an online marketplace to learn about Siemens’ and its partners’ products and offerings, helping buying groups make the right decisions based on facts and customer references.

Step 2: Siemens Xcelerator Evolves Into An Open Digital Business Platform

Siemens experienced many early successes, such as making digital twins of DMG MORI machines available to cut testing times; combining RIIICO’s 3D factory mapping capabilities with Siemens appliance specifics to set up facilities faster; and using Bember’s fully integrated smart parking application to complete Siemens’ Building X offering (see Figure 2). Following these successes, Roland Busch, with the support of Siemens’ Managing Board, was able to sharpen, prioritize, and communicate Siemens Xcelerator’s strategic ambition.

Siemens Xcelerator was created as Siemens’ open digital business platform and was designed to accelerate the digital transformation of industries. This mandate empowered the Siemens Xcelerator team to work with and across all of Siemens’ business lines and country organizations to create a holistic and strategic digital business platform. Siemens Xcelerator:

Is an open platform with more than a thousand offerings. Customers can explore and buy from more than 1,500 Siemens offerings in a guided one-stop shop. This is supported by a strong partner ecosystem of over 500 partners, with one-third of offerings coming from partners, which provides the additional benefit of peer-to-peer expert exchanges between customers and Siemens’ partners (see Figure 3).

Enables cross-silo collaboration. The machinery behind Siemens Xcelerator’s online presence provides a layer that cuts across all of Siemens’ business lines. This made Siemens’ vast product range more transparent and composable for employees in various functions and business lines. The demarcation line between partner and competitor continues to intentionally blur — to the benefit of Siemens’ customers. According to Bettina Rotermund, “In the beginning, we deliberately didn’t create an organization chart to people thinking in boxes. We didn’t want Siemens Xcelerator to become an HQ initiative.” Technically, the initiative sits with the Siemens strategy department, headed by Dr. Peter Koerte, who is a member of the Managing Board and Siemens’ chief technology officer and chief strategy officer; however, it doesn’t have a hierarchical organizational chart as Siemens Xcelerator isn’t limited to just one organization. The work is distributed across Siemens’ HQ and country organizations and is also driven by the central Siemens Xcelerator team, which comprises more than 100 people with counterparts in many businesses and countries.

Helped drive internal transformation. According to Bettina Rotermund, the cross-silo collaboration was the most critical step, due to the huge internal change required for success. Besides repeated messages from the Managing Board, the Siemens Xcelerator team benefitted from training 300 of Siemens’ top leaders on digital transformation and platform economies, which enabled them to drive top-down change. In parallel, Bettina and her peers collaborated with volunteer early adopters for rapid successes that created a huge pull effect across Siemens. These successes were repeatedly shared and translated into employees’ understanding about how Siemens Xcelerator related to their jobs.

Step 3: Siemens Xcelerator Looks To Scale And Mature

In 2024, Siemens’ Managing Board kicked off the ONE Tech Company initiative, with the intention of boosting the customer experience and accelerating customers’ innovation cycles. The initiative is a company change program that aims to adapt company processes, such as shifting from physical to digital sales, understanding and addressing broader buying groups, identifying new approaches to marketing and communications, and keeping partnerships harmonized. This includes streamlining employee target models and incentive structures. The ONE Tech Company initiative is foundational for enabling further Siemens Xcelerator scaling and growth. The Siemens Xcelerator team is already planning Siemens Xcelerator’s final maturity phase. Starting in 2027, this phase will focus on:

Cocreation and co-innovation. It will bring new partners and other actors onto the platform to enable cocreation and partner-to-partner co-innovation. “The question is not whether to be part of an ecosystem or not. It is just: To make or join? Siemens Xcelerator draws so many customers and partners because it is so much easier to cocreate and co-innovate than before,” says Bettina Rotermund.

Creating new secondary business models. These include customer and partner certifications or data-based as-a-service/as-a-platform models.

Monetizing platform data. It will also enable platform members to develop their own business models.

Measuring The Results: From Growth KPIs To Financial KPIs

In the beginning, the Siemens Xcelerator team didn’t consider measuring the success of the project in terms of ROI or other financial KPIs, as the investments required only involved jumpstarting the initiative and fostering greater innovation within Siemens and its ecosystem. Over time, it has incorporated new metrics to measure success, including:

Adoption and growth-related performance metrics. Once the platform was live, Siemens started to measure performance with a variety of metrics, such as the number of unique customers and their growth rates; trends in the number of one-time versus returning customers; and how users maneuvered through the website, where they got stuck, and at what point they left the website. Siemens considered its results in these metrics to be strong, which helped justify continued investment in the project.

The number of sellers and partners. As the Siemens Xcelerator project evolved, measuring the number of sellers and partners on the platform as well as how often customers visited partners’ microsites was essential to understand if the reality of the project aligned with its mission. Siemens also employs continuous oversight to ensure a healthy balance of sellers and partners.

Financial KPIs. In time, Siemens added financial KPIs to assess the revenue that Siemens Xcelerator generates; this amounted to a CAGR of 14% from 2020 to 2025. The latest addition is the growth rate of the overall portfolio, consisting of Siemens’ products, its partners’ products, and solutions that Siemens’ businesses and partners mutually develop. This is an important metric, as it relates directly to the vision of its ONE Tech Company program.

Additional Insights

Siemens’ all-at-once, global approach to change led to critical insights and rapid successes, but it also placed a lot of stress on its contributors. In retrospect, Bettina Rotermund would have preferred starting smaller, with no more than three business lines initially, and to scale sequentially later. At the same time, she confessed that starting smaller might have jeopardized the huge and rapid impact that the Siemens Xcelerator project has had on the company.

Siemens is investing significantly in its ecosystem to increase resilience against supply chain disruptions and sudden partner losses, stay up to date on tech innovation, and maintain its relevance with its customers.

How Forrester Helped

Forrester’s insights helped Siemens establish its Siemens Xcelerator platform. Robust competitive intelligence and market perspectives from Forrester’s Market Insights played a crucial role in launching this initiative. Forrester also helped the Siemens Xcelerator team with right-sizing the Siemens portfolio and its modularity. As partnership engagement and ecosystem building are critical components of Siemens Xcelerator, Siemens relied on Forrester’s expertise regarding platform economies and partnership engagement models. Siemens also turned to Forrester to refine and clarify its go-to-market message and customer communications to ensure the messages were impactful to their customers and stakeholders. Together, Forrester and Siemens succeeded in building a future-fit company that uniquely meets its customers’ needs.

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