Microsoft Corp. on 3rd April announced that it has agreed to acquire ProClarity Corp., a software company based in Boise, Idaho, that develops advanced analysis and visualization technologies that work in association with Microsoft's business intelligence (BI) platform, which includes Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005, Microsoft Office Excel® and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server. The upcoming release of the 2007 Microsoft Office system significantly increases and broadens Microsoft's investment in BI, and this acquisition deepens that investment, providing functionality that includes additional advanced analysis and visualization technologies as well as business-logic-driven "guided" analysis.

"ProClarity has been a valued Microsoft partner for many years, with a strong R&D organization, more than 1,200 mutual customers and a sales force that already works closely with ours," said Jeff Raikes, president of the Business Division at Microsoft. "This acquisition advances our BI strategy and our ability to deliver performance management applications to customers."

"Our focus at ProClarity is to give organizations a simple, powerful and adaptable interface to insight, expanding on the power of the Microsoft business intelligence platform. We share Microsoft's enthusiasm for making BI accessible to all decision-makers within an organization," said Bob Lokken, CEO of ProClarity. "We look forward to applying our people and our technology to have even greater customer impact as an integrated, strategic asset within Microsoft."

Prashanth Rai