Microsoft WPC: Exoprise Takes Office 365 Monitoring Tool to Channel

Monitoring SaaS apps isn't easy; and when there is a problem, it can be very tricky to determine what the cause of the issue is. Does the problem originate in the customer's network? In the Internet connection? Maybe the SaaS app itself? With Microsoft (MSFT) Office 365, the dashboard monitoring is fairly limited, of course, but now cloud-based monitoring provider Exoprise has a solution.

Launched today at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 (WPC13), CloudReady Monitor for Office 365 was designed with the channel in mind. In particular, the Microsoft channel. Exoprise is working with Microsoft to take the new offering to market through Microsoft partners around the world, which should give Exoprise a major boost when it comes to expanding its overall market.

The new solution is backed by a partner program to facilitate organization's move to the cloud—and specifically, the Microsoft cloud, whether it's Office 365, Windows Azure or another service offered by the Redmond technology giant.

"The solution combines multiple different kinds of sensors you would use to monitor your Office 365 service," explained Patrick Carey, vice president of Product Management and Marketing at Exoprise.

Carey noted the new offering can monitor a variety of different points of potential failure (or bottlenecks), including network bandwidth and AFDS, as well as others.

"They're adapting to this new world of selling SaaS applications themselves. They're evolving out of traditional packaged software and looking at how they build and restructure their businesses," Carey said.

In addition to the launch of the monitoring solution and the partner program, Exoprise has also developed a free assessment solution that channel partners can use to build a business case for the CloudReady monitoring tool. According to Carey, the assessment offering was designed to help partners engage their customers that are considering moving to the cloud (and which customers aren't these days, really?). With the tool, they can do assessments on customers' Exchange mailbox environments, for instance, and provide hard data on how customers are using email and attachments, as well as the flow of email traffic. At the end, they can provide customers with recommendations about how to use the cloud to save money, increase productivity and which user groups would be best-suited to moving to the cloud sooner rather than later.

"We're working closely with Microsoft, and they're aligning this with partners in the cloud essential bucket. There are about 100,000 of those cloud essential partners," said Warren Mead, vice president of Channel and Sales at Exoprise.

That's a huge potential partner base for a company that was only spawned in 2010. Mead told Talkin' Cloud that Microsoft is helping out a lot to bring CloudReady Monitor for Office 365 to the channel and customers, and that could mean the difference between a slow migration to the tool or a significant uptake in deployment.

And considering the less-than-ideal monitoring available directly from Microsoft, the Exoprise software could be poised for major growth in the months ahead.