SoftwareOne has acquired and integrated House of Lync, a Microsoft High Touch Partner and part of Microsoft’s Skype Operations Framework, creating an improved Skype for Business unified communication (UC) solution for its global enterprise customers. This is a direct response to the rising demand of Skype for Business services.
House of Lync works with organizations in order to deploy Skype for Business. The company specializes in collaboration, enterprise voice, cloud, on-premises, managed services, customer application integration, contact centres, conferencing, hybrid integrations with traditional PBX’s, and Office 365.
House of Lync allows SoftwareOne to combine each company’s offerings to streamline Skype for Business migrations, which will be known as SkypeSimple. SkypeSimple is an end-to-end professional services offering for on-premises, hybrid, private, or public cloud, essentially allowing customers to pick and choose what aspects of Skype for Business they would like to leverage.
“SoftwareOne is one of the largest global providers of Microsoft software, and customers work with them for their licensing, which is very complex, and once they acquire those licenses, the next question is how do they consume it and make the most of that investment,” said Carol Eastman, SoftwareOne’s Skype for Business Practice lead, and the former founder and CEO of House of Lync, in an interview with CDN. “The blend of our organizations gives that customer a one-stop shop, and the ability to see all the assets they’ve acquired, all under one umbrella.”
Allowing companies to pick and choose what aspects of Microsoft unified communications makes the most sense to invest in is key. “Customers are moving to the cloud carefully and in phases, it is not an all-in opportunity. [House of Lync] does all phases, everything from strategic planning with customers, to consulting, and roadmapping with them, building out a plan for moving forward with the cloud,” said Eastman.
An important aspect of House of Lync’s new technology is ProtoSkype, a new self-contained and fully functioning proof of concept that is unique to the market and allows customers to adopt Skype for Business at faster rates.
“People can leverage the cloud with ProtoSkype,” said Lawrence Schwartz, CMO at SoftwareONE, to CDN. “Customers can start with a private cloud environment, and move that directly into their network, or just use it as a testbed to see what they like best.”
With ProtoSkype, customers can better understand what assets in Microsoft’s unified communications are best for them. They can test UC applications to see what they are like, and how to best move forward within their own business.
“A customer can jump in without balancing it with their current environment, and see all the possible options, and then decide what they want and go to House of Lync, who can take it into private cloud for them, alleviating the need for them to build their own infrastructure. This dramatically speeds up the time it takes to get to market,” said Eastman.
ProtoSkype features include:
- Monitoring and support 24/7/365
- ADFS, Exchange, SQL
- Microsoft Office and Exchange integration
- Enterprise-grade security and reliability
- Contact centre
- Call accounting
- Call recording
- PSTN Calling
- Interactive voice response
- Devices – headsets and handsets
- Room system integration
- Single pane of glass console
- All white spaces integrated and supported