Microsoft’s corporate vice president Zig Serafin says in a blog that it has acquired the ‘technology assets’ underlying the UC Commander product suite from Event Zero, a leading provider of management software for Skype for Business Online. This acquisition will allow it to expand and improve the built-in management tools for Skype for Business, and is the latest example of Microsoft’s commitment to deliver a complete, enterprise-grade communications solution at global scale with Office 365. Event Zero will continue to service its customers and partners.

On Event Zero’s web site, it states that Event Zero’s experience-focused analytics are well-matched to the world class UC platform Microsoft has built in Office 365. David Tucker, Event Zero CEO says “Microsoft was a logical partner for the technology. I see the purchase benefiting more Skype for Business customers than Event Zero could possibly reach”. Event Zero will continue to provide its award-winning support to its customers now and in the future as they migrate to Microsoft’s offering.

Event Zero is a minnow – a home grown Aussie company (now with an office in Washington, USA) that developed software to make it easier to implement and manage Skye for Business. So what did Microsoft actually buy?

Microsoft has since clarified that ‘UC Commander assets’ include provisioning functions including support for numbers and desk phones; operations functions, including reporting and alerting; and usage and quality analytics and visualization.

It does not include the company formed in 2005 by its 3 founders; David Tucker, Matt Crump, and Jerome Witmann. Initially it was focused on solving the problems of ‘large transactional system orchestration’ - a generic tool used for monitoring, debugging and issue tracking when high volume transactional backend systems have problems with a single transaction and its orchestration between many servers and services. Over the years this led to ‘Complex Event Processing’ software and then ‘Enterprise Commander’ – its Skype implementation and support suite.

Microsoft states.

Our goal is to make the Skype for Business management tools as powerful and easy-to-use for IT professionals as Skype is for end users. Today, customers of our calling and conferencing services can use the Office 365 administration centre to acquire and assign phone numbers to their users in minutes, view reports of audio and video conferencing usage, and quickly access aggregated call quality information using our Call Quality Dashboard. In the future, using the technology acquired today, we will be able to add strong diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities with even more extensive reporting and analytics for online audio, video conferencing and media streams — all within a unified management and admin system.

We plan to extend the platform to complement partner solutions and integrate their monitoring, reporting and analytics capabilities with Skype for Business Online management tools. For example, partners will be able to more easily connect on-premises deployments they manage with Office 365 services, including hybrid deployments, provisioning of phones and other endpoints.

We are committed to bringing our customers the leading enterprise communications management experience in Office 365, and enabling IT professionals and our partners worldwide to deliver powerful, high-quality communications services to their users — wherever they are, rapidly and cost effectively.

Financial details have not been disclosed.