Carousel Industries announced the launch of SmartPoint Managed Services for Skype.
The announcement follows Microsoft’s unveiling of Skype for Business, and is offered as an end-to-end managed services solution optimized for managing and monitoring a Skype for Business Universal Communications (UC) ecosystem.
“Carousel looked at the marketplace and determined that most, if not all Lync Managed Services offerings were reactive in nature, relying on reports for calls and sessions that are already complete,” Ed Wadbrook, vice president of applications and collaborative solutions for Carousel Industries, told eWEEK. “What customers want is the ability to have real-time monitoring to identify root cause and reduce time to remediate issues.”
Wadbrook said Carousel can view call flow data in real time and receive proactive alerts that can drill down to individual source ports in the network that may be causing–or will cause–poor performance.
“Instead of just telling a customer, ‘it’s the network’, Carousel has the expertise to work with customers all the way through an issue to remediation,” he said.
The SmartPoint Managed Services platform enables customers to identify incorrect network settings and utilization within a client network, and receive important notifications on network events impacting Skype.
Businesses can also access real-time media analytics pertaining to Skype voice and video sessions, access site-based performance trending and reporting in a multi-tenant interface, and gain insight into Skype conferencing sessions and issues.
The platform provides customers with a managed services package, optimizing both performance and efficiency, while the 24/7 service covers all dimensions of a communications environment. Additionally, the platform is designed to offer intelligence, diagnostics and monitoring of the entire unified communications infrastructure.
“We also have certified status as a Microsoft Support Partner, with more than the required certifications to enable us to interpret and diagnose the issues that are identified in our clients’ Lync and Skype environments,” Wadbrook said. “We offer support for Lync Room Systems as well as integrated solutions, recognizing that Lync and Skype are part of an overall enterprise solution, not just a standalone product.”
He noted Carousel has the in-house expertise and bench depth to support customers across a variety of different systems, reducing the potential for finger pointing that can occur even at the Microsoft Premier level.
“We work in agency with several vendors to own support incidents from beginning to end, avoiding the silos of product knowledge that exist with too many service providers,” he explained.