Azaleos Launches Microsoft Office 365 Hybrid UC Offering

Azaleos Corp., a hosted Microsoft Exchange messaging service provider and one in the first wave of preferred Office 365 cloud productivity suite deployment partners, has announced the updated Azaleos Managed Hybrid Service (MHS), which integrates private cloud or on-premise unified communications (UC) with Microsoft’s cloud. And it’s available today, right now, for the first wave of Office 365 adoptees.

The new Azaleos MHS is an update to its existing offering, which worked with Office 365 forerunner Microsoft BPOS. And like that original hybrid offering, this version sees Azaleos “monitoring, management and reporting across both on-premise Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and Lync systems and the Microsoft Office 365 cloud service,” according to the press release. And if you want to run it from a private cloud but don’t have the capability, Azaleos will even help with deployment.

Azaleos VP of Product Management and Marketing Scott Gode said MHS is really ideal for users who want to give the public cloud a spin but don’t want to — or can’t — move certain data off-site. Gode said Azaleos handles three key pain points around hybrid offerings: network and infrastructure set-up and configuration, a potential single point of failure for Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) and unified management for both public and private resources.

Part of Azaleos’ marketing for MHS is a list of situations where this kind of hybrid cloud approach to UC is warranted, including:

Intriguingly, Gode said this managed hybrid offering shows Azaleos’ unique position in Microsoft’s channel: Where most partners are developing software on top of the Microsoft Office 365 offering and others are promoting migration solutions, Azaleos has prepared a really high-level integration.

Essentially, Gode said yes, Azaleos makes more money on hosted Microsoft Exchange, on-premises managed services and private cloud deployment than the public cloud. But Microsoft has helped the company figure out how to make money, no matter what customers choose, and what’s good for Microsoft’s cloud business is good for Azaleos.

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