Siemens agrees to sales deal with Microsoft

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.

[Via Carl Tyler’s Blog]

I left a comment on Carls blog :
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)