Rivals T-System, SEN team up for global partnership

FRANKFURT, April 22 (Reuters) - T-Systems and Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) will combine their services to offer unified communications worldwide, gaining scale to compete in a growing market.

The market for unified communications -- the simplification and integration of all forms of communications across multiple devices and media types -- is showing rapid growth, the two companies said in a statement on Thursday.

Both T-Systems and SEN are struggling to increase market share and margins while competing with bigger rivals such as Cisco (CSCO.O), Atos Origin (ATOS.PA) or IBM (IBM.N).

SEN is a joint venture between Siemens (SIEGn.DE) and U.S. financial investor Gores Group. It specialises in communications systems for large corporations.

T-Systems, which is the smallest unit of German telecoms group Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), provides IT and telecoms services for businesses as well as for German federal and municipal governments and European public administrations. (Reporting by Nicola Leske, editing by Will Waterman)