CoreView, which is aggressively engaged in expanding its channel business, has enhanced management and security with its Alpin acquisition, and released both a new version focused on reporting, and a free version that won’t expire.

CoreView, which makes an intelligent SaaS Management Platform focused specifically on Office 365, has deepened its management capabilities with the acquisition of Alpin, and extended its solution offering with two new products, CoreReporting and CoreCommunity. This extension of their offering comes as the company is engaged in an aggressive building out of their channel business from a model which historically had been largely direct.

CoreView started out life as a solution provider and a Microsoft partner – in Italy.

“The company was founded in Milan Italy in 2002, and was bootstrapped by their own owners,” said Michael Morrison, who joined CoreView as CEO earlier this year. At that point, they were known as 4ward.

“Their business was completely focused around the Microsoft ecosystem, and they were a top Italian partner,” Morrison indicated. “By 2014-15 they saw the world was going to the cloud, and was struggling with the management and administration of Office 365, so they built a management platform on top of it.” The SaaS management platform of today, was introduced in late 2016, and the company became 4ward365 to reflect this new focus.

4ward365 was soon approached by New York-based venture capital and private equity firm Insight Venture Partners about being acquired, and Insight secured a majority stake in early 2018. The company was also rebranded from 4ward365 to CoreView at that point. The two founders remained with the company, as Chief Global Strategist and CTO respectively, with Insight installing their own CEO. That CEO, however stepped aside in early 2019 for personal reasons, and Morrison replaced him.

“Our differentiation is our deep knowledge of Office 365 at a very granular level,” Morrison said. “I like to say we are the Splunk of Office 365, with a very robust data set that can tell you everything about what’s going on. Today the company has 55 people, of which 25, all in Milan, are in development.”

The company’s sweet spot extends from the midmarket to the enterprise.

“We are enterprise scale, and Kaiser Permanente is our biggest customer,” Morrison said. “Our customers extend down to the midmarket – companies with 2000 seats and above. We have maybe a dozen companies under 1000 seats, because the ROI isn’t as compelling. We target the 5000-75,000 seat space.”

The Go-to-Market remains primarily direct, although changing that has been a priority.

“Today, the Go-to-Market is about 75% direct and 25% is through partners,” Morrison said. “It really should be 15-85% partner. The fact that it isn’t is a factor of relative newness into the market. Building out the partner ecosystem has been a big focus since I’ve been here. Microsoft LSPs [Licensing Solution Providers] like Softchoice and SHI know where the bodies are buried. They manage 99% of the licenses around Office 365, and we partner with all them.” Microsoft ISVs are the other partner category, as well as strategic technology partners. CoreView does a lot of  work with Veeam.

In late October, CoreView acquired SaaS application provider Alpin.

“Alpin is a SaaS management company, but not tied to Office 365,” Morrison said. “They run deep across many SaaS applications and allows you to discover, identify and manage the spend of applications. The strategy behind acquiring them is that every week, a customer asks if we do more than Office 365. Alpin has 40,000 SaaS applications.”

While Alpin’s broad-based business will continue to operate as before, it will also provide specific value to CoreView by identifying shadow IT applications.

“Our strategy for it around Office 365 is that it can identify non-Microsoft companies like Slack on the network and quarantine them or migrate them back into Office 365,” Morrison indicated.

Recently at the Microsoft Ignite event in Orlando, CoreView also added two new solutions, CoreReporting and CoreCommunity.

CoreReporting Edition provides a streamlined way for organizations looking for deeper visibility into their Office 365 tenant, providing much more detailed reports compared to Microsoft tools.

“Of the three pillars of value that we offer, reporting and analytics is one,” Morrison said. “Our CoreAdmin solution for Office 365 management includes core reporting – 210 packaged reports out of the box. But to get that, you had to buy CoreAdmin. For those who just want the reports, we have isolated the reporting capabilities in CoreReporting Edition. It’s a subset of CoreAdmin that hasn’t been available on its own.”

The other new offering is CoreCommunity Edition, a free version of CoreView. It provides a series of dedicated dashboards that track more than 100 KPIs/metrics, and provides a free Office 365 Health Check.

Morrison said that CoreCommunity is designed as a free ‘Try and Buy’ offering, illustrating value by informing the customer on trends and highlighting the opportunities for improvement on security, savings, and operational issues.

“It has reports, but not the breadth of CoreReporting,” Morrison said. “It is targeted at Office 365 admins. It is free though, and they can use it forever. It doesn’t expire.”