Carl Tyler's Blog :: Siemens agrees to sales deal with Microsoft

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Siemens agrees to sales deal with Microsoft

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Siemens agrees to sales deal with Microsoft - Microsoft and Siemens have announced a multiyear sales and marketing agreement, enabling the sales forces to work together in order to sell the Siemens HiPath Openscape that includes integrated telephone awareness and IM from LCS to large businesses. I saw this almost two years ago now, and it had a very workplace feel to it. A browser based portal that not only gave IM awareness but also telephone awareness from your Siemens phone system, made a very cool demo, but I still have my doubts that everyone will live in a portal. So a limitied solution for a limited market.

Posted by Carl Tyler On 01/11/2005 | Permalink |

Comments

1 - Not sure if I agree with you on the limited solution for a imited market there Carl. It not about a browser or a portal.
This is about Presence (or Awareness) throughout all applications on a users' desktop. Through Presence and phone integration, te PC basicly becomes a phone. IP Telephony or VOIP is a very hot topic today and the majority of large organsiation are either deploying VOIP or have plans to do so in the coming few years. Integrating the VOIP infrastructure with the desktop is a huge opportunity if you ask me.

Check for example the info on Microsoft's new IM client codename Istanbul(http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/oct04/10-19newrtcollabclientpr.asp)

Posted by Peter de Haas At 03:49:22 AM On 01/11/2005 | - Website - |

2 - Hi Peter, I'm in agreement with you I'm not saying that LCS has a limited market or phone awareness has, I am talking of Portals having a limited market. So Workplace/Websphere/Openscape etc.

VoIP, IM and telephony integration is going to be huge, I've commented before on how I think MS actually understands this better than IBM, so whilst IBM is busy talking abut their 5 year IM technical lead and rebuilding Sametime in Workplace, Microsoft is busy partnering with every telephony company out there, and guess which product they're going to push?

We have exposed Click to Call functionality in the existing Sametime Connect client for customers using the Premiere Conferencing Bridge, which allows people to start 1-1 chats or even start a full blown audio conference for the selected users. For users of our Queue Manager we also have the ability to take an IM chat and convert it to a full fledged telephone call. So we're fully on the IM/telephony integration bandwagon and are true beleivers. I saw Istanbul at the LCS Developers conference early last year, somethings I like, somethings still need some work. For Sametime users it has some nice features, emoticons and timestamps

. I did like the way the Siemens system showed the status of the phone as well as IM status, so it displayed the user as being on the phone, off the phone, redirected to voicemail etc.