New Experience Management Solution for Microsoft Skype for Business Online in Microsoft Office 365

PRESS RELEASE: IR, the leading global provider of experience management solutions for unified communications and contact centers announced support for Microsoft Skype for Business Online in its industry leading IR Prognosis for UC.

Organizations can now provide better visibility into call and meeting quality issues and faster troubleshooting in a single solution across Skype for Business Online as well as on-premises, multi-vendor environments, and co-existing UC solutions from Cisco and Avaya.

Businesses are investing in cloud-based technologies like Skype for Business Online to meet their communication and collaboration needs across the enterprise. For organizations that are migrating or extending to the cloud, Prognosis for UC will provide user experience and performance management insights, troubleshooting and root-cause analysis beyond the premises to include Office 365 users as well.

Not only can you see if you’re having poor quality, but also the root cause of the problem and how to fix it. Prognosis for UC, combined with the Prognosis UC Assessor for network performance assessment, delivers the most complete end-to-end experience management solution for multi-vendor UC ecosystems across premises and cloud environments. And it’s still all done without the need for expensive network probes. In addition, Prognosis is a Microsoft certified IT Pro Tool partner solution, a certified network assessment solution for Skype for Business Online, and is recommended to be used in conjunction with the Skype Operations Framework (SOF).

Kevin Ryder, Chief Marketing Officer at IR said, “Senior executives are keen to reap the benefits of digital transformation, which is underpinned by effective communications and collaboration. However, this can be undermined by a lack of planning and comprehensive UC management tools, leading to poor user experience and adoption. Ensuring end-to-end visibility across an entire UC ecosystem is critical and by extending Prognosis capabilities into Skype for Business Online, our customers gain valuable insights to identify and remediate issues quickly regardless if they exist on-premises or in the cloud.”

Levon Esibov, Partner PM Director at Microsoft Corp. said, “Microsoft is committed to providing to our customers the best experience possible through our Skype for Business solution, so we set very high standards for our partner solutions evaluated through the IT Pro Tools Program. We’re pleased that IR Prognosis for UC has been a certified product helping organizations plan, deliver, and operate a successful Skype for Business solution.”

It’s more important than ever that companies are investing in performance management solutions like Prognosis, because as the complexity of UC systems grow, so can the operational cost if they do not have the right management solutions in place. According to a recent study published by Nemertes Research, organizations that use specialty tools to manage UC implementations and performance save 58 percent in IT costs over organizations that do not.1

“In addition to a reduction in operational costs, our research has shown that customers using UC management and monitoring tools also see an increase in user adoption,” said Robin Gariess, President at Nemertes Research. “More than half of the organizations that we surveyed still do not leverage the benefits of UC monitoring and management tools. Organizations that invest in solutions such as Prognosis not only see wider UC adoption, but also reduced staffing needs and overall UC operating costs.”