Microsoft to boost Office 365 with Equivio purchase

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Microsoft has announced that it has purchased Equivio, an Israeli-based text analysis software startup.

Equivio's aim is to help its customers tackle "legal and compliance challenge" that's linked to managing large amounts of email and documents.

Office already offers some of these features but the acquisition of Equivio should boost that significantly, not least because of its machine learning capabilities, which can be improved simply by adding more compute resources, either locally or through the cloud (think Azure).

In theory, it means that an Equivio system can be trained and replicated across several locations and can benefit – almost instantly - from a corpus of knowledge acquired from other similar Equivio systems as well.

Speed demon

It's not the first purchase by Microsoft in that field; the company purchased FAST, an enterprise search product, back in 2008 for a whopping $1.2 billion, which became the core of Microsoft's Enterprise Search Group.

FAST technology is also what powers a new Office product called Delve, which uses the Office graph to facilitate information discovery.

Details of the deal haven't been disclosed but various reports put the deal value between $150 and $200 million.

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