Perennial CDN Top 100 solution provider Softchoice is introducing a managed services suite for Microsoft Office 365 called Keystone Essential for Office 365.
Keystone is being positioned by the company as proprietary, end-to-end solution designed to support the transition of on-premise workloads, such as email, to Office 365 in the cloud.
Kevin Wright, Softchoice’s CIO and senior vice-president of services and technology, said the technical skills gaps are holding businesses back from reaping the full benefits of cloud-based solutions like Office 365. With Keystone, Softchoice is able to support clients’ hybrid environments around the clock, and ensure they’re fully leveraging their Office 365 investment.
The main elements of Keystone Essential for Office 365 helps organizations to maintain service availability during the migration with 24/7 support and incident management. It also enables customers to become cloud competent through mentorship and product update notifications, along with preparing for future business technology reviews.
With Keystone, users gain direct access to a community of certified Microsoft Cloud Services personnel through the on-shore Softchoice Keystone Technical Support Centre at any day and any time. This service also eliminates phone queues, according to the company.
Wright added that there is a fundamental shift in the enterprise IT landscape from on-premise to online. This trend, according to him, goes beyond migrating organization’s productivity suite to the cloud and more about creating a need for a larger, all-encompassing software-as-a-service (SaaS) management strategy.
“And that’s what we’re doing. We’re helping clients navigate and thrive in this new technology frontier,” he said.
Office 365 is just the latest from Softchoice in its managed services journey. In June of 2013, the company became offering VMware vCloud Hybrid Service across Canada and the U.S. as part of its managed services.
At the time, Softchoice CEO David MacDonald told CDN that vCloud Hybrid Service would be part of a much bigger portfolio of “cloud-ready” managed services from the company.
Softchoice managed services also include consulting, technical expertise and monitoring virtualized environments.