Microsoft’s acquisition of Parature a win all around, analysts say

The news this week that Microsoft inked a deal to acquire cloud-based customer engagement software company Parature to complement Microsoft Dynamics CRM is being met with positive reaction by analysts.

The buy, reportedly valued at $100 million, will enable Microsoft to add the strength of Parature's multi-channel customer service capabilities to Dynamics CRM to better compete with other industry leaders, according to industry experts.

Although Forrester Research Inc. considers Dynamics CRM a "strong CRM product for customer service," the app has its flaws, but this deal could improve some of them.

"The solution had some obvious deficiencies: no agent facing knowledge management or web self service capabilities, no chat capabilities and the solution lacked robust email response management capabilities," Forrester analyst Kate Leggett said in a blog post. "This prevented them from effectively competing in multichannel customer service deals against the likes of Salesforce's Service Cloud and Oracle RightNow."

Parature's revenue is at $16 million, according to Leggett.  She writes that Microsoft can use Parature's cloud-based multi-channel customer service capabilities to respond to customer demand for that functionality. Currently, there are connectors between Dynamics CRM and Parature, which several companies already use, she noted, and these integration points will almost certain to be improved.

Parature is expected to remain a standalone solution, independent of Dynamics CRM, for customers that only want the features offered by Parature, which means current Parature customers don't have to worry about being supported, she added.

In the opinion of R "Ray" Wang, Founder ...