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Providing greater visibility for enterprises moving Microsoft Office applications into the cloud, Exoprise Systems has launched a performance monitoring offering for Microsoft Office 365 that combines crowd sourcing with active point-of-access monitoring to deliver real-time insight into the performance of Office 365 applications. CloudReady Monitor for Office 365 provides IT departments, value-added resellers and managed service providers with visibility into their entire Office 365 service delivery chain, including online services, Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), and network health and bandwidth.
The subscription-based Office 365 suite delivers online access to the software and services built around the Microsoft Office platform. However, visibility into Office 365 performance is limited to the Microsoft Office 365 Service Status Dashboard, which can’t provide real-time end-to-end performance data or information on the health and availability of the various networks connecting the users to the service, said Exoprise.
Enterprise adoption of cloud-based office applications could be threatened by a lack of tools to monitor and manage performance of these services, said Exoprise. Revenues of the cloud-based productivity suites market is expected to increase from $1.6 billion in 2012 to $5.9 billion in 2016, according to a Microsoft Office 365 analysis and forecast report from The Radicati Group.
In response to the industry’s need for a more robust monitoring tool, Exoprise’s offering provides real-time statistics, alerts and trend reports for the entire service delivery chain. It also leverages crowd sourcing to pool performance data from all users to provide baseline metrics to compare performance, pinpoint problems and speed up issue resolution.
“Exoprise is opening up the cloud to enterprises by providing an optimal service management experience that takes full advantage of all the benefits of SaaS [software as a service],” George Nichols, president and CEO of Exoprise, said in a statement. “By combining local performance data, aggregated crowd data, and other important context information, we provide a robust 360 view into service availability and performance of Office 365 apps.”
The offering delivers four core capabilities, including active point-of-access monitoring, which provides visibility into the actual service delivery chain for the user location and enables the proactive detection of problems; crowd-sourced data analytics, which delivers a global view of availability and performance metrics to customers, helping them to quickly find the location (local, ISP or SaaS provider) of any service impacting issues; simple management as a service deployment, leveraging the cost, simplicity, availability and scale benefits of SaaS.
CloudReady Monitor also delivers deep environment analytics via a comprehensive assessment tool that provides analysis of a customer’s Exchange environment. “This can identify important usage patterns that help solution partners and service providers to guide a customer in selecting the right mix of SaaS email, communication, and collaboration tools, along with data from which to structure a cloud migration plan,” said Exoprise.
A free trial of CloudReady Monitor can be downloaded from the Exoprise Website. The offering is available through Exoprise-certified channel partners.
Exoprise also announced the launch of its new Microsoft Partner Program at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) this week. The new offering, together with complementary value-added services, provides Microsoft Office channel partners with new revenue opportunities, said Exoprise. The CloudReady Monitor is expected to help improve customer satisfaction with Office 365 thanks to enhanced visibility and speed to resolution for service issues.
A 2012 WinterGreen Research report forecasts cloud office and collaboration productivity applications to reach $21.6 billion by 2018, up from $3.9 billion in 2011, spurred by the lower costs of delivering productivity tools to users via the cloud compared with server licensing of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Exchange.