28 May 2009

Microsoft has announced the Social Enterprise Alliance, a strategic collaboration between two of the company’s Gold Certified Partners, Telligent Systems. and speakTECH. The alliance aims to deliver an integrated social networking solution for customers in the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors.

The alliance will launch the Social Enterprise Solution, which includes platform and application products and services that enable companies to connect to and leverage key customer communities through social networking and analytics technologies.

Microsoft says the Social Enterprise Alliance will enable manufacturing and consumer goods customers to achieve deeper insight and stronger connections to their customer, partner and supplier communities. Unlike point solutions built on rigid platforms and lacking value-added services, the Social Enterprise Solution delivers customised workstreams integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft’s extensible collaboration and workflow platform; powerful community and analytics provided by Telligent’s Community Server enterprise social computing platform; and expert design, user experience and systems integration services from speakTECH.

“The Social Enterprise Alliance with Telligent and speakTECH demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to recognising partners that collaborate to offer a higher level of solutions and services offerings that are more relevant to customer needs,” said Greg Urquhart, general manager of US ISV and National System Integrators in Microsoft’s US Partners Group. “By integrating Telligent’s Community Server platform with speakTECH’s integration and services expertise — all of which leverage the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server platform — companies have a better solution to connect with their customers, partners, suppliers and investors.”

“Manufacturing and consumer goods companies have a unique opportunity to put the power of social computing to work across all aspects of their business, improving engagement and collaboration of employees, partners, distributors and customers,” said Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent. “Holistic social computing solutions enable the agile and innovative enterprise.”

“Companies are finding the return on investment for social media campaigns to be aggressively outpacing traditional marketing strategies,” said Aaron Sloman, CEO of speakTECH. “It’s driving a transformation where traditional marketing departments need to re-tool as interactive marketing agencies.”

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