Companies in the manufacturing and consumer goods industry will be able to leverage a new social computing offering resulted from an alliance between Microsoft and Microsoft Gold Certified Partners Telligent Systems and speakTECH. Through the Social Enterprise Alliance, the Redmond company and its partners are giving companies the chance to deepen the connection they have with their customers. The upcoming integrated social networking solution is aimed at companies in the manufacturing and consumer goods sectors, the software giant points out.

“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,” revealed 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.”

Rob Howard, founder and CTO of Telligent, indicated that he saw social computing solutions as the driving factor behind performance and innovation at enterprise level. This is where Social Enterprise solutions come in, delivering a bundle of not only social networking applications and services but also the underlying platform.

“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,” Howard stated, while Aaron Sloman, CEO of speakTECH, emphasized that social media campaigns were the next step in the evolution away from traditional marketing. “It’s driving a transformation where traditional marketing departments need to re-tool as interactive marketing agencies,” he said.