Today I am pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired technology assets underlying the UC Commander product suite from Event Zero, a leading provider of management software for Skype for Business Online. This acquisition will allow us to expand and improve the built-in management tools for Skype for Business, and is the latest example of Microsoft’s commitment to deliver a complete, enterprise-grade communications solution at global scale with Office 365. Event Zero will continue to service its customers and partners.
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.
We are committed to bringing our customers the leading enterprise communications management experience in Office 365, and enabling IT professionals and our partners worldwide to deliver powerful, high-quality communications services to their users — wherever they are, rapidly and cost effectively. I look forward to sharing more details in the coming months.
Zig Serafin