Microsoft 365 Informed Network Routing Brings More Innovation to Customer Connectivity

I’m excited to highlight some news related to the Microsoft 365 informed network routing (INR) feature, which is designed to provide enhanced visibility to application quality of experience measurements across Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams.

 

We launched INR over a year ago to help bring new insights and better experiences to our customers and partners, and we’ve seen increasing interest since then within the SD-WAN industry.

 

VMware SASE Partnership

First, we’ve announced a partnership with VMware to bring INR feature integration to the VMware Edge Network Intelligence solution. This will allow VMware SASE customers to gain enhanced visibility to their Microsoft Teams application experience in near real-time. This visibility allows for increased confidence of quality and reliability across the entire connectivity path to ensure world-class experience with Microsoft 365. In the future, we look forward to adding additional Microsoft 365 services to this integration, and expanding the use of INR signals further across the VMware SASE suite of products.

 

Cisco SD-WAN Enhancements

Next, we’re very pleased that Cisco has recently announced further innovation on our INR integration with the Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN platform. In the 20.9.x SD-WAN release, Cisco has added new Path Analytics functionality to help customers understand how path selection is taking advantage of the application experience signals provided by our INR feature, augmenting the existing probes in the SD-WAN solution. Additionally, onboarding and ongoing configuration maintenance has been simplified to allow customers to automatically configure and update their egress IPs in Microsoft’s INR feature. We encourage all customers on the Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN platform to enable Cloud On-Ramp for SaaS and onboard to the INR feature to experience optimized connectivity and the benefits to end-user experience.

 

We’re looking forward to further innovation and growth in our partnership with VMware and Cisco, as well as across a broader set of industry partners who we’re working with towards bringing INR to a larger set of customers.

 

Jeff Mealiffe
Microsoft 365 Routing Plane Team