Pulling all your tech into the cloud

In my first blog, I talked about how software was helping to take organisations on a tech journey in a way that hardware alone could not. I talked a bit about the benefits of the cloud but I want to double click on this area. Other than the business centric agility that the cloud brings at the SaaS layer, it also offers significant advantages at the infrastructure layer. The environment is always uniform and up-to-date with no need to constantly monitor and update software patches -- which could turn into a big infrastructure and resource overhead.

This doesn't mean you can forget the traditional underlying infrastructure stuff. They're telling themselves, "I've got an operating system running there; I've got software that I have to keep updated; and I've got QA-dev production environment that has to be sustained."

With the cloud, you don't need to do all of that. It just becomes as a service when you need it at the scale you require at that point in time. In the cloud the QA and Dev environments are also generally replicas of production that is not normally attainable in bespoke solutions. What we've done at Microsoft is bringing this out as a Voice-as-a-Service capability within Microsoft Office 365. This gives organisations one technology and environment they need to go.The real beauty? It's wrapped natively into the collaboration stack.

The Microsoft Office 365 solution is not just a bespoke voice solution, or a productivity solution. It's all come together under one integrated solution, one environment, one administration and one security authority-- that ensures the experience is as productive as possible for the end user and the administrator.

It really speaks to an organisation on a digital transformation journey, and in the cloud a customer has the ability to accelerate this journey with the underlying infrastructure to support its requirements and aspirations.

You want to consolidate and control it to unify the user experience. Most users we speak to who are engaged with three or four vendors in the environment tell us how these software stacks aren't playing well together; they aren't uniformed or integrated.

Getting an integratedsolution that acts in a predictable way and enhances the experience is valuable to them. Organisations are carrying a lot of extra overhead on their balance sheet just to maintain these multiple environments. That's money you can return onto your balance sheets and buy Voice-as-a-Service or Productivity-as-a-Service.

The way that Microsoft has come out with our solution simplifies the management and administration of these environments. Organisations no longer require a lot of those infrastructure components, they don't need their own servers,they don't need their own people to support or their own power for these on prem environments.

Microsoft takes all of that into the cloud so you do not have the burden and can focus on your business. When our customers want to switch up the new branch site, or they want to integrate their company and an acquisition, we give them the ability to do that in the cloud.

It is just so much easier now. The cloud really delivers the promise to quickly and predictably give all users, especially new ones, the exact same experience as what your current users have.

Stop wasting time and money, integrate your environments into one place.