Siemens Integrates Twitter Into Communications App

In a nod to the growing influence of social networking in the business world, Siemens’ enterprise communications unit is looking to integrate Twitter with its unified communications application.

At the VoiceCon 2009 show in San Francisco on 4 Nov, the Siemens Enterprise Communications Group—or SEN Group—is demonstrating the use of Twitter within its OpenScape UC applications. The preview will be given during a keynote at the show by Mark Straton, the company’s senior vice president for marketing of voice and application solutions.

The demonstration will show off the Twitter functionality in OpenScape while running in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud computing environment.

The company expects to offer Twitter integration within OpenScape in the first quarter next year, according to SEN Group officials.

The demonstration in San Francisco is designed to show businesses how easily they can integrate social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn into their larger communications deployments, according to Straton. Such social networking applications not only improve communications between employees, but also between businesses and their customers.

“Social media tools have rapidly moved from being the preferred communication method of Millennials to the standard by which enterprise workers and customers can quickly and freely connect,” Straton said in a statement.

At the VoiceCon show in Orlando, Fla., in March, SEN Group officials showed a proof-of-concept of its cloud computing, which they said illustrated the benefits of OpenScape’s standards-based foundation. The UC application is built on OpenSOA Web services and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) standards, all of which feed into its capability of integrating with social networking apps, they said.

At the San Francisco event, SEN Group officials also are announcing that OpenScape can now be accessed in a cloud computing fashion. Using software development kits, developers can create programs that leverage the OpenScape application with social networking programs, officials said.

Through a pay-as-you-go model, developers will be charged an hourly price to access the OpenScape application and run development and production instances of the software as they develop mashups with social networking programs.