Microsoft Announces Social Enterprise Alliance

Microsoft has announced the formation of the Social Enterprise Alliance, a strategic collaboration between Microsoft and two of its Gold Certified Partners—Telligent Systems and SpeakTech—to deliver an integrated social networking solution for customers in the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors.

Microsoft officials said 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.

The Social Enterprise Alliance enables manufacturing and consumer goods customers to achieve deeper insight into and stronger connections to their customer, partner and supplier communities. And the Social Enterprise Solution delivers customized work streams integrating Microsoft Office SharePoint Server with community and analytics provided by Telligent’s Community Server enterprise social computing platform, as well as design, user experience and systems integration services from SpeakTech.

“The Social Enterprise Alliance with Telligent and SpeakTech demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to recognizing 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, U.S. ISV and National System Integrators, U.S. Partners Group at Microsoft. “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, in a statement. “Holistic social computing solutions enable the agile and innovative enterprise.”

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