Mergers and acquisitions help companies for growth and expansion, and to set their footprints in multiple industries and geographies, which in turn ensures that they stay on the top. It is significant to explore multiple functionalities and domain where different kind of calculated risks are involved. According to the definition, to seek effective control over the assets and management of the corporate without any combination of both of them can be termed as an acquisition.
Acquisitions aim at the optimum utilization of all available resources, resulting in achievement of synergies in multiple areas, achieving economies of scale, forming strong talent base, installing an integrated R&D platform and ultimately improving the profitability.
From last 30 years, Microsoft has acquired nearly 200 companies now. And more than twenty of them are from January 2015. As a matter of fact, many will have to put efforts in improvement of Microsoft’s current Azure and Office 365 cloud offerings. Clearly, Microsoft’s intentions of acquiring these companies are to enhance their own products.
Naturally, the purpose behind each acquisition is different. Here are some notable examples which grabbed the attention of the industry.
VoloMetrix: The VoloMetrix is a well-known company in people analytics for the enterprise. They are influenced by the way businesses operate and drive better results. Their technology will work with Office 365’s Graph and Delve Analytics, appearing on dashboards with the actionable metrics of how people are using time, and analyzing employee behavior with the goal of constant improvement of it.
Equivio: Equivio develops text analysis software for e-discovery. They are the provider of machine learning technologies for e-discovery. Microsoft’s email compliance options need an information governance. Hence, when integrated with Exchange Online, Equivio’s tech will help users explore huge and unstructured sets of data to find relevant parts effectively.
Adallom: Adallom secures enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) application usage, audits user activities, and protects workforces and digital assets from threats in real time. They offer an access-security broker for other services, like Office 365, Salesforce, Box, and Dropbox. Nowadays each firm is investing heavily to strengthen its reputation and capabilities around security.
Secure Islands: Secure Islands Technologies is a company that develops advanced and innovative Information Protection and Control (IPC) solutions, incorporating intelligent and patented data-centric security technology. They offer an advanced policy-based data classification and information protection, to be used in Azure and Office 365.
Revolution Analytics: Revolution Analytics focuses on R, an internationally popular programming language for statistical computing and predictive analysis. Microsoft plans to build R into SQL Server and Azure, among other uses.
Metanautix: Metanautix is a firm which specializes in helping large enterprises to filter through their hordes and oceans of in-house data. Microsoft has acquired Metanautix to help their customers connect data for business insights.
TouchType: TouchType Limited, well known in industry as SwiftKey, has developed keyboard applications providing text predictions. It offers SwiftKey, a next-word prediction and auto-correction software based on the context and meaning of user’s sentences on mobile devices.
Solair: Solair produces IoT solutions that help enterprises to track their products, capture data to determine maintenance schedules, resupply requirements for consumables, meter for calculating fees, etc. These sensors become part of the product design and Solair works with enterprises during the integration process.
Talko: Talko builds software and services for communications as well as social productivity, while focused on new usage scenarios enabled by cloud-connected mobile devices. They are currently in pre-release product development.
Incent Games : Incent Games’ primary product is, well-known FantasySalesTeam, which is developed to improve CRM adoption. Microsoft’s plans for integration of FantasySalesTeam are for its own Dynamics CRM product line. Furthermore, Microsoft plans to look into other areas where it can integrate FantasySalesTeam and will continue to support non-Microsoft CRM platforms with those offerings.
Microsoft made these acquisitions in the tech-industry in 2015 to pursue their mobile-first, cloud-first strategy. As the industry is reshaping itself with new technologies like IoT, Microsoft is aggressively acquiring companies in the cloud, mobile app, and unified communications spaces to be able to get more options for revenue growth.
According to studies, Microsoft made the most mergers and acquisitions in 2015 under the guidance of Satya Nadella, CEO. They made 18 acquisitions in 2015, which is considerably a high number as compared to ten acquisitions in 2014.
On the second place, comes Google. Microsoft was followed by Google, which made sixteen transactions in the year 2015. The report on these acquisitions further stated that since 2011, tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Twitter, and Yahoo have made more than twenty three acquisitions that were each more than $1 billion.
Tech players like Microsoft are aggressively looking forward to growth. Even though Amazon uninterruptedly rules the cloud, Microsoft was the one who achieved the highest growth in the cloud space in 2015.
The field of Unified Communications is seeing a rapid growth since last few years. Innovations in mobile apps and globally increased connectivity are the factors that are expected to drive growth in the UC space. Startups like Talko, which provides real-time messaging, show foresightedness. And focusing on these, Microsoft is preparing itself to reach the upcoming milestones.
