Posted by Charlotte, USA: Microsoft early this week announced the first set of five partners and solutions that have met the requirements for O365 Networking Partner program and qualified to become certified partners for O365.
These five partners and solutions include Citrix SD-WAN, NetFoundry Network-as-a-Service, NTT Communications SD-WAN service, Silver Peak Unity EdgeConnect and ZScaler Internet Access.
These partners, according to Microsoft are certified to deliver Office 365 networking “in a way that minimizes latency and maximizes performance and reliability of enterprise connectivity on Office 365 user experience.”
Calling “network reliability” as the most significant factor, Microsoft in a blog post said that, “the most significant factor that determines the quality of the Office 365 end user experience is network reliability.”
All these five partners “have met Microsoft’s testing requirements” and “support a high-quality end user experience.” Microsoft also stated that Cisco, Oracle and Riverbed are in the midst of trying to get qualified.
However, Microsoft also released Office 365 Network Connectivity Principles earlier in his May, which also included important information on Office 365 architecture, network connectivity principles, optimization, challenges for enterprises and so forth.
NetFoundry’s O365 networking optimization solution states that it is the only one of the five Preferred Partners to both enable the lowest latency Office 365 networking (direct Internet without trombone through third party cloud infrastructure), and not require a specific WAN solution, instead functioning as software-only NaaS, on top of any WAN.
The same NetFoundry Platform used for O365 optimization also enables Zero Trust, private Azure connectivity, and has both NaaS and Developer Platform options.
“We are excited to be the first Zero Trust, NaaS provider to be a certified partner in the Microsoft Network Partner Program for Office 365. We are ‘the easy button’ for optimized O365 because our solution enables businesses to optimize O365, without implementing a SD-WAN solution or deploying hardware, while securing business sites with our
Zero Trust solution, and without needing to send the data through third-party infrastructure,” said Galeal Zino, CEO – NetFoundry.