COVID-19: My open letter to our stakeholders

During this global health crisis, our priority is the health and wellbeing of our employees, customers, partners and their respective families and communities. To this end, we’ve taken many steps over the past few weeks to enable us to continue developing and delivering solutions that speed digital transformation and best support our customers throughout this uncertain period. This includes canceling or postponing some events and transitioning to virtual events whenever it works best for our customers. 

Changing work conditions present an opportunity for our community to increase their skills and abilities with Siemens software. Effective immediately, and for the period of the COVID-19 impact, we’re offering free 30-day subscriptions to our online learning memberships. With this offer, the community will have free access to a rich set of video-based learning, labs and other engaging training content that can improve proficiency in the products they already use and build skills in new Siemens solutions.

We know that many of our users are working outside their normal environment, so Siemens is working to expand access to our portfolio to our community. A free version of the Mendix application development platform is available for anybody, and many of our solutions are available for free to students and start-up companies.  Today we’re making available to students and instructors a free 12-month license of the student edition of Mentor’s flagship PADS Professional PCB design software. In addition, we’re working with our customers to enable home use of some of our products.  

As an industry leader with a broad network of partners and customers across industries from medical devices to industrial machinery and aerospace to pharmaceutical, we feel a responsibility to apply the power of our ecosystem to creating innovative solutions for global issues including sustainability and the coronavirus pandemic. As one example, we’re partnering with Engineering for Change on the Innovate for Impact design competition, which will award $20,000 for innovative solutions that solve hunger and clean water challenges, and we’re extending the deadline until May 4, 2020.  

We recognize that we are in extraordinary times, which is why we’re taking these steps to support our communities and each other during this period of change. As this situation evolves, we pledge our support to our employees, customers, partners and communities – we’re all in this together, and we encourage you to reach out anytime.

-Tony