Skype is a pretty big deal for Microsoft, representing the company’s principle communications tool among its various product lines and serving as a marquee cross-platform solution as part of its “cloud-first, mobile-first” strategy. Microsoft has made a number of investments in Skype over the years to flesh out its capabilities, and today the Microsoft blog announced the purchase of management reporting and analytics technology from Event Zero.
Meant to enhance Microsoft’s Skype for Business Online offering, the acquisition brings advanced management tools to make administering large Skype for Business installations more efficient.
Our goal is to make the Skype for Business management tools as powerful and easy-to-use for IT professionals as Skype is for end users. Today, customers of our calling and conferencing services can use the Office 365 administration center to acquire and assign phone numbers to their users in minutes, view reports of audio and video conferencing usage, and quickly access aggregated call quality information using our Call Quality Dashboard. In the future, using the technology acquired today, we will be able to add strong diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities with even more extensive reporting and analytics for online audio, video conferencing and media streams — all within a unified management and admin system.
We plan to extend the platform to complement partner solutions and integrate their monitoring, reporting and analytics capabilities with Skype for Business Online management tools. For example, partners will be able to more easily connect on-premises deployments they manage with Office 365 services, including hybrid deployments, provisioning of phones and other endpoints.
The enterprise remains Microsoft’s premier customer base, and the acquisition of new and innovative technologies bolsters the company’s home-grown advancements. We’ll continue to keep you updated as Microsoft both builds and buys new technology.
