Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Datazen Software, an Ontario, Canada-based company that makes mobile and desktop business intelligence software. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Datazen’s product allows companies to take in a big swath of data from their on-premise servers (especially those powered by Microsoft’s SQL Server) and then transform that into intelligent dashboards that can be viewed by employees on iOS, Android, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Microsoft plans to integrate the technology into its Power BI business intelligence product for Office 365 users. In addition, users of SQL Server 2008 and later with Software Assurance will be able to download Datazen Server at no additional cost.
Datazen is primarily focused on providing services for companies that have on-premise servers, while Power BI is built primarily for use with Microsoft Azure. By integrating the two, Microsoft can argument its service to work better in hybrid cloud deployments that include both on-premise and public cloud resources. In addition, Datazen’s mobile codebases may become useful for improving Power BI’s mobile apps.
The startup’s existing products will remain available in their current form, so the company’s current customers can keep using them. In a blog post, Datazen CEO Miljan Braticevic said that the company will continue developing its products further.
The acquisition is yet another deal Microsoft made to enhance its big data and business intelligence chops. The company has been pushing Power BI at industry and press events as a way for enterprise users to get the most out of large sets of business data they have access to without needing a data science team. Leadership in the realm of big data has been a major focus of Satya Nadella’s tenure at Microsoft, and this acquisition gives Microsoft access to new tools to pursue that goal.
The news comes a week after Microsoft closed its acquisition of Revolution Analytics, another big data company behind the Revolution R programming language that helps developers work with large amounts of data.
