Azaleos Real-Time Management Delivers Reliability for Microsoft VoIP
Azaleos Corporation, the managed messaging and collaboration services company, today announced that it has expanded its market leading managed services for Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint with a new offering that covers Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). This new service rounds out Azaleos’ offerings for the entire Microsoft Unified Communications application server stack. The new OCS service from Azaleos provides 24X7X365 real-time management for customers that want to or have deployed Microsoft’s all-in-one platform for instant messaging (IM), internet voice calling (VoIP), and web/video conferencing. In order to accelerate the transition to unified communications and maximize the payback provided by OCS, Azaleos is offering migration services to help organizations plan and set-up OCS.
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To improve employee productivity and efficiency, OCS enables organizations to integrate their voice and data networks, and key communication and collaboration technologies (IM/presence, voice calling, and web/video conferencing). However, the complexity created by interconnecting these technologies and the expertise required to manage them may exceed the in-house capabilities of most organizations. Furthermore, since all of these critical infrastructure services are handled by OCS, service quality degradation and/or downtime can potentially cut-off a company from the outside world. The Azaleos managed service for OCS provides round the clock monitoring and management of all the elements within OCS by experts in two network operations centers (NOC), who can diagnose and troubleshoot problems before they can impact end-users.
“Unified communications, and specifically Office Communications Server, are very appealing to organizations of all sizes for their ability to streamline business processes. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of confusion among enterprises about how to define unified communications, how to use it, and where to start with respect to strategic IT planning,” said Michael Osterman, Principal of Osterman Research. “Our research shows that enterprises spend an average of $73 per user per month managing unified communications systems. A comprehensive monitoring and management service, like the new Azaleos offering, can add significant value by reducing the costs and internal IT resources needed to deploy and keep Office Communications Server running smoothly.”
Worry Free Management for the Entire OCS Stack
To help companies take advantage of the business productivity boosting capabilities of OCS, the Azaleos managed OCS service provides monitoring and management of the IM/presence, web and video conferencing, and intra-enterprise VoIP functions within Microsoft’s real-time unified communications platform. Management for Exchange e-mail is available as a separately billed service. Azaleos experts in its East and West NOCs continuously monitor over 1,500 data points per minute focusing on both the availability and service quality of the above mentioned OCS services to detect, diagnose, and repair problems before customers even know they exist.
In addition to its patented ViewX monitoring technology, Azaleos has developed some key new innovations for its OCS service designed to deliver a static-free UC experience for end-users. These include:
* Expanded SQL Server monitoring capabilities that enhance storage performance for OCS, as well as complementary Azaleos managed services for BlackBerry Enterprise Server and SharePoint
* Azaleos F5 Local Traffic Manager (LTM) monitoring, which provides full end to end management of network load balancing, a key component for maintaining a robust enterprise OCS architecture as well as high performance for Exchange 2010 systems
* Synthetic OCS client functionality for continuous testing and proactive monitoring of communications services (IM, voice, video and conferencing) quality and response time between end user nodes within an organization
Free OCS Educational Seminar Series
In conjunction with the launch of its managed OCS service, Azaleos today announced a series of free on-location seminars and webinars to help IT and business decision makers understand the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls to avoid when deploying OCS. The seminars and webinars will be led by Azaleos experts with deep knowledge on managing OCS and its individual elements including IM/presence, web/video conferencing, and VoIP. For a complete list of dates, times, and locations please visit http://www.azaleos.com/insight/events.aspx.
“Microsoft Office Communications Server brings together a powerful set of communication and collaboration capabilities on a single IP network, which can boost productivity in a big way but also introduces significant new layers of complexity for IT departments,” said Scott Gode, vice president of marketing and product management for Azaleos. “The Azaleos OCS service is designed to eliminate the management challenges – both from an availability and service quality standpoint – associated with this real-time communications platform, so organizations that lack IT expertise, resources or prefer to outsource this workload, can still deploy OCS.”
Full Suite of Exchange Services
Azaleos offers the most complete and reliable set of remotely managed services for Exchange (including Exchange 2010) based messaging, SharePoint Server, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. The company is the only service provider offering on-premise remotely managed Exchange services, as well as third party datacenter and hybrid hosting options. In addition to the new OCS service, Azaleos’ full complement of add-on services includes:
* Filtering Services, cloud-based e-mail anti-virus/anti-spam
* Archive Services, e-mail archiving and storage for Exchange server
* Mobile Services, turnkey management and monitoring for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server
* Continuity Services, e-mail business continuity and disaster recovery
* Active Directory Services, remote monitoring and management of Active Directory
* SharePoint Services, remote monitoring and management of SharePoint
Availability and Pricing
The Azaleos remotely managed Office Communications Server service is available immediately. Pricing starts at $5 per user/month.
About Azaleos
Azaleos Corporation provides the benefits of hosted e-mail, collaboration, and unified communications services for organizations that can’t or won’t allow their data to reside outside the datacenter. Azaleos’ 24X7 remotely managed services for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, Active Directory, and BlackBerry Enterprise Server keep information on-premise and under IT control, while uptime, maintenance, and support is handled by experts in its network operations centers. Hundreds of companies from Fortune 500 to mid-market enterprises rely on Azaleos and its patented ViewX technology to manage their collaboration infrastructures and address issues before users ever know they exist. Azaleos is a Microsoft Gold Certified partner, and one of Microsoft’s top 35 NSI partners in the US. For more information visit http://www.azaleos.com.