IR Adds Bevy of Microsoft Partners for Skype Performance Management

IR has announced that 64 Microsoft certified partners worldwide have now joined the IR global partner program.

These included 39 newly signed partnerships over the past year, which are being propelled by the increase in the adoption of Microsoft Skype for Business as a part of digital transformation initiatives in the enterprise, the company said. It offers the Prognosis UC Assessor solution for pre-deployment and Prognosis for UC for monitoring and troubleshooting, to help ensure that Skype for Business implementations are successful.

“As we partner with our customers to help drive digital transformation within their organizations, they are looking to us to not only provide them innovative and forward-looking solutions such as Skype for Business Online, but to do so in a way that provides them a smooth transition and an exceptional user experience,” said Jim Banach at New Signature, an IR partner. “If you take shortcuts in the planning, build, or operation of modern UC solutions, the overall experience and user adoption will slow and hinder those digital transformation initiatives.”

A recent Nemertes Research issue paper shows that companies with successful digital transformation initiatives are investing 72 percent more in unified communications (UC). Over the past two years, as Skype for Business has grown to become a major UC provider, many organizations are either evaluating or deploying it to accelerate productivity and to support their digital transformation efforts. Nemertes Research has also seen that digital transformation success is driven by optimized UC performance, which must be done with the right performance management solutions.

“For UC to operate at maximum efficiency, IT leaders should leverage performance management tools,” said Robin Gareiss, president at Nemertes. “Many organizations’ employees, customers and partners rely on UC to communicate and collaborate, so any outages, downtime or poor user experience affects productivity, operational costs and user adoption. Performance management solutions not only reduce UC quality issues, but they also decrease UC operating expenses by 50 percent, and increase user adoption by 31 percent.”