Microsoft today announced that they have acquired Event Zero technology assets to enhance Skype for Business Online. In particular, Microsoft has acquired technology assets underlying the UC Commander product suite from Event Zero. These assets will help Microsoft is improving built-in management tools for Skype for Business. Since this is a technology only acquisition, Event Zero will continue to service its customers and partners as usual.
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.