Siemens Enterprise Communications Previews Twitter Functionality Within OpenScape Unified Communications Environment in Cloud at VoiceCon

November 4, 2009

Company to Demonstrate Enhancements Coming to Flagship Product in 2010 That Harness the Power of Social Networking Within Today's Advanced Communication Ecosystems

BOCA RATON, Fla., Nov. 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group), a premier provider of enterprise communications solutions, today announced the company will be previewing Twitter functionality for the OpenScape Unified Communications (UC) application while running in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) environment. The demonstration will happen at VoiceCon San Francisco on Wednesday, November 4th at 10:30 a.m. during the keynote given by Mark Straton, the company's senior vice president, marketing of voice and application solutions. SEN Group expects to offer Twitter integration from within OpenScape in the first quarter of 2010.

This enhanced functionality builds on the cloud proof-of-concept shown at VoiceCon Orlando by demonstrating a mash-up between OpenScape and Twitter, an integration that is a testimony to the company's standards-based approach to UC and its OpenPath commitment to extensibility. Built on OpenSOA Web services and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) standards, OpenScape is an ideal platform for integrating today's multi-vendor communications environments, including popular social networking tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It offers users a seamless and innovative user experience, helping them to achieve the productivity gains these tools can provide within the enterprise. It also underlines the company's continued commitment to the cloud and social networking as it continues to develop and incorporate these capabilities into its proven UC applications.

"Given the obvious connection between UC and social networking in terms of real-time, multimedia digital communications, we see this integration not only as innovative, but also a natural progression as social media becomes more widely adopted and embedded in the enterprise communications mix," commented Jonathan Spira, CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex, a leading New York-based analyst firm specializing in new media and communications trends.

In addition to demonstrating the power of integrating Twitter and OpenScape, SEN Group is making OpenScape accessible via the cloud model, allowing organizations to use software development kits (SDKs) to create these mash-ups and test them in the cloud environment. For a small hourly per instance price, developers will be able to run development and production instances of OpenScape software, making this "pay-as-you-go" model an even more attractive option for IT departments with limited budgets and resources. This enables organizations of all types to mitigate risk while leveraging the social networking phenomenon within their UC applications to enhance the user experience and productivity.

"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," said Mark Straton, senior vice president of marketing, voice and application solutions. "Wednesday's demonstration will highlight just how easily organizations can incorporate these tools into their existing communications ecosystems and harness their power to better serve their customers."

About Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group)

The SEN Group is a premier provider of end-to-end enterprise communications, including voice, network infrastructure and security solutions that use open, standards-based architectures to unify communications and business applications for a seamless collaboration experience. This award-winning "Open Communications" approach enables organizations to improve productivity and reduce costs through easy-to-deploy solutions that work within existing IT environments, delivering operational efficiencies. It is the foundation for the company's OpenPath® commitment that enables customers to mitigate risk and cost-effectively adopt unified communications. Jointly owned by The Gores Group and Siemens AG, SEN Group companies include Siemens Enterprise Communications, Cycos, and Enterasys Networks.

Note: Siemens and OpenScape are registered trademarks of Siemens AG or its subsidiaries and affiliates. All other company, brand, product and service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

This release contains forward-looking statements based on beliefs of Siemens management. The words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "forecast," "expect," "intend," "plan," "should," and "project" are used to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the company's current views with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause the actual results to be materially different, including, among others, changes in general economic and business conditions, changes in currency exchange rates and interest rates, introduction of competing products, lack of acceptance of new products or services and changes in business strategy. Actual results may vary materially from those projected here. Siemens does not intend or assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

SOURCE Siemens Enterprise Communications