Microsoft has been pretty quiet on the acquisition front since its $1.2 billion buy of Yammer in July. But this week the software giant picked up a small, 11-year-old company Overland Park, Kansas company called PhoneFactor.
PhoneFactor, with fewer than 50 employees, specializes in what’s dubbed “multi-factor authentication.” Essentially, it creates a another layer of authentication when people are attempting to login to business or personal accounts, sending a text message or phone call with an additional passcode they enter.
“With Microsoft’s product breadth and distribution reach, it will be possible to bring the benefits of PhoneFactor to a broader set of customers, partners and developers than we could as a stand-alone company,” wrote PhoneFactor CEO Timothy Sutton in a blog post. “And as part of Microsoft, we will work to improve the interoperability and ease of use of our solutions – but more to come on that in the future.”
Added Microsoft’s Bharat Shah, corporate vice president of Server and Tools Division: “The acquisition of PhoneFactor will help Microsoft bring effective and easy-to-use multifactor authentication to our cloud services and on-premises applications. In addition, PhoneFactor’s solutions will help Microsoft customers, partners and developers enhance the security of almost any authentication scenario.”
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.