Nectar’s Network Assessment & Monitoring Solution, Perspective, Certified for Skype for Business

Certification validates Nectar’s commitment to Skype for Business deployment success

Nectar Services Corp. announced today that its Perspective product has been certified for Microsoft’s IT Pro Tools Partner Program for Skype for Business Online. This certification qualifies Nectar to be recognized as a Skype Operations Framework (SOF) Tools Partner. Nectar was the first UC monitoring solution to achieve IT Pro Tools certification for Skype for Business Server. The company was also named 2016 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award Finalist and received the IDC 2016 Innovators Award for its Perspective solution and Advanced Assessment Partner Program.

Nectar’s Perspective solution provides network assessment and active monitoring capabilities that are now certified under Microsoft’s IT Pro Tools Program for Skype for Business Server and Skype for Business Online. By obtaining this certification, Nectar further bolsters confidence among partners and enterprise clients that data obtained from Perspective can help support an optimum end-user experience for those organizations intending to migrate to Skype for Business Online in Office 365.

“As more enterprises rollout new UC deployments, the emphasis on ensuring they work properly before full implementation cannot be understated. Without proper planning and pre-assessment of the network, a UC deployment can easily be abandoned and never fully adopted if problems arise early on,” said Tom Tuttle, senior vice president of UC strategy and global alliances at Nectar. “It is critical for our partners to be able to provide this level of visibility for their customers prior to any UC, cloud or SIP migration project. With access to actionable UC performance information, IT professionals are able to quickly identify and remediate issues—reducing the impact to the user—thus ensuring the best possible user experience.”

As a component of Nectar’s comprehensive UC Management Platform (UCMP), Perspective uses synthetic traffic to simulate UC sessions which allow service providers and IT professionals the ability to identify network configuration and performance issues before they impact the end-user experience. Perspective has recently been enhanced to support network assessments for Skype for Business Online deployments in addition to Skype for Business Server deployments. Recent capability enhancements have exposed new metrics that enable partners and enterprise clients the ability to perform advanced network assessments that align with the Skype Operations Framework methodology and requirements.

Beyond Perspective, Nectar’s UCMP solution helps to support the entire Skype for Business and UC life cycle – including planning, deploying, and operating. Nectar’s unique visibility across the delivery ecosystem quickly allows Managed Service Providers and enterprises alike to identify and resolve issues before they become major problems.

“Of all the proactive network management and monitoring solutions available in the market, Frost & Sullivan identifies Nectar’s proprietary Nectar for Skype for Business as the industry’s most comprehensive UC management and monitoring solution,” remarked Olga Yashkova Program Manager-Communications Test & Measurement Practice Measurement & Instrumentation, Frost & Sullivan.

Commenting on a recent network assessment, John Lamb, president and co-founder of Modality Systems stated, “Without Modality and the customer using Nectar’s Perspective product, we would have only identified the issues after the users had problems and in this case, we were able to identify them before the project launched.”

Furthering a commitment to quality network assessments, Nectar developed a partner certification program that aims to help enterprise customers identify partners trained to leverage Nectar’s Perspective solution to design, deploy and report the results of network assessments for both cloud and on premise UC deployments, including Microsoft Skype for Business Online. Certified Partners currently include Avanade, Carousel, Co-Mergent, Datapoint Europe, Modality Systems, Tata Communications and SmartQube.

Nectar will be demonstrating its full portfolio of UC performance management and diagnostics software solutions at Enterprise Connect in Orlando March 27-29, 2017 at the Nectar Booth, No. 1327. Nectar solution partner Atlas Communications is also featuring Nectar’s solution in their demonstration at Enterprise Connect.