Siemens joins Salesforce.com marketplace

Siemens Enterprise Communications is hopping on the Salesforce.com bandwagon with a conferencing program available on the software-as-a-service giant’s AppExchange marketplace for hosted applications.

Siemens Openscape is available now on AppExchange, offering users in the financial services sector a way to plug in videoconferencing and collaboration capabilities to Salesforce’s core sales and customer relationship management capabilities. Openscape is presence-aware, allowing users to determine the best means of communication, depending on the location of other participants.

Siemens previously offered Openscape as an on-premises tool, although it also began offering it on a hosted basis from late last year.

“In financial services there’s growing complexity in terms of supporting multiple clients and multiple products and the CRM program is critical to them,” said Andy Chew, Siemens senior vice-president for unified communications.

“For unified communications to take off, it needs to be integrated into day-to-day activities and business processes and applications that support those business processes. Financial advisors are now often home-based and mobile, and there are lots of skunkworks projects around Salesforce in financial services.”

Salesforce will next week announce details of its Winter ’07 release.