Microsoft Teams Up with Tech Partners for Social Networking Enterprise Solution

Microsoft has teamed up with Telligent and speakTECH to form the Social Enterprise Alliance. Via the Alliance comes an enterprise social networking solution for manufacturing and consumer goods sectors companies.

The Social Enterprise Solution is designed to be a robust solution, integrated with a company’s site instead of than simply copying and pasting code from Google’s Friend Connect or Facebook Connect (which leaves a site co-branded with Google or Facebook).

“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.”

Ultimately, the Social Enterprise Solution is designed to define and develop communities based around a company.

“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.”

As social media continues to grow at a rapid-fire pace, a deep integration of social networking technologies is becoming a necessity for many brands.

“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.”