Microsoft Acquisition to Beef Up Skype for Business Management Tools

Microsoft announced this week that it has acquired the assets from Event Zero to improve its Skype for Business online offering. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

In an announcement on Wednesday, Microsoft said the acquisition of the technology assets underlying the UC Commander product suite from Event Zero will allow the company to improve the built-in management tools for Skype for Business.

Event Zero, a provider of management software for Skype for Business Online, will continue to serve its customers and partners.

“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,” Zig Serafin, corporate vice president, engineering, Skype for Business said in a statement. “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.”

According to a blog post by Microsoft, the company plans to integrate Event Zero’s monitoring, reporting and analytics capabilities with Skype for Business Online management tools.

Serafin said Microsoft would share more details about the integration in the coming months.