SkyKick Accelerates Its Office 365 Migration Platform

SkyKick, a close Microsoft partner, has released an upgrade to its cloud migration platform that should significantly speed the work of partners on-boarding enterprises to Office 365.

The Seattle-based developer of migration tools last week rolled out QuantumSync, a feature that accelerates most migrations by two to four times while also improving their security, Bernard Clark, Skykick's director of product management, told CRN.

"For our partners, a successful on-boarding onto Office 365 is the most crucial part of any customer's Office 365 or cloud journey," Clark said. "Getting a customer onto Office 365 successfully is what's going to set them up with a solid, ongoing relationship with that customers, so we don't want to sour the relationship with their first step into the cloud."

[Related: SkyKick Revamps Office 365 Migration And Backup Suites]

QuantumSync brings together several innovations around performance and security, taking advantage of throughput gains from Microsoft's evolution of the Exchange Web Services API.

Making the platform execute migration projects with more speed and security is "key to the profitability of our partners’ migration business," Clark said.

The new feature goes beyond copying and pasting—it transforms data and user identities in line with how a customer chooses to store and manage those assets.

Many variables govern the speed with which data is moved into the cloud, but SkyKick has seen in real-world migrations those two- to four-time performance improvements, Clark said.

Most of those gains come in the initial migration phase—setup, provisioning, and configuring of users and mailboxes—where failures often delay Office 365 adoption.

"Our application takes care of those mundane parts," Clark said.

QuantumSync has been rolled out to Microsoft cloud partners in recent months.

Shane Monty, vice president of Bang Industries in Montreal, said his company made a bet on SkyKick to facilitate its Office 365 engagements because of its ease of use, speed and security.

QuantumSync takes those attributes to the next level with its upgraded capabilities, Monty told CRN.

"It helps shorten the time frame and it makes the client happy because we are now ahead of schedule," he said.

Security is another important concern for clients, Monty said, "and even for those that don’t raise it as a concern we point it out, so they can rest easy."

"The fact that SkyKick can effectively manage throttling in Office 365 with a single global admin account is huge for us," Kent McLeod, owner of DPE Systems, a Microsoft partner in Seattle, told CRN.

"QuantumSync demonstrates to me that SkyKick is always listening and collaborating with partners and investing to make things better all the time," McLeod said.