Cogmotive
Detailed Reporting and Analysis of Your Office 365 Environment

To keep up with the evolving technological landscape and mobile mentality, businesses are making a rapid shift to cloud computing. Assisting them in this transition is Cogmotive Reports—a product that provides simplified and automated cloud reporting. “Though cloud-based computing services offer clients the convenience of accessing files and email services remotely, this can pose challenges to IT departments and cause hiccups to existing systems that are designed to monitor organizational productivity,” says Alan Byrne, Cofounder, Cogmotive. “We have created an online reporting application, which helps customers understand how these services are consumed and whether they are receiving a return on investment,” he explains.

Cogmotive is not a traditional Microsoft partner and they don’t currently provide consulting or hardware services. Instead Cogmotive provides a bespoke web-based reporting application to Office 365 customers on a subscription model. This application gives customers much-needed visibility of whether the bill that they receive from Microsoft actually reflects employee usage. Cogmotive offers tools to help customers to understand usage trends and logon statistics, save money by identifying unused licences, monitor compliance and security, manage mobile devices and understand employee engagement.

All of these tools help businesses to more efficiently procure software licenses and ensure that employees have access to the functions and services required for them to do business. In addition customers can access long-term trends to help them perform capacity analysis for their future licensing needs. Many customers performing migrations from an on-premise solution into a cloud solution use Cogmotive to help them track migration milestones.

These customers schedule reports automatically to easily keep project teams up to date without needing to divert project resources from core tasks.

A real-world example of a customer using Cogmotive Reports is the University of Edinburgh. In January 2013, the University migrated more than 24,000 student email accounts from Exchange 2007, which was hosted in-house, to Office 365. Ensuring this transition happened smoothly with adequate support for student users, while monitoring the effectiveness of the new email service, was a major challenge for the University’s IT department. By using Cogmotive Reports—the company’s core offering—reporting on the new environment was improved considerably. Through the application the University was able to identify critical IT issues concerning device compatibility and better understand how students used the new services.

Most companies don’t know how their cloud infrastructure is being used–that’s where we come in

In order to provide this service Cogmotive works closely with Microsoft. Recently Cogmotive discovered a security vulnerability within the Microsoft Office 365 Administration portal. Cogmotive and Microsoft worked together to close this gap and safeguard customer information.

Going forward, Cogmotive aims to provide more reporting capabilities around SharePoint online and other Microsoft cloud services. “We also see a lot of opportunities in consulting and plan to expand our business to provide services around this area,” Byrne concludes.