Just weeks after picking up application optimization specialist jClarity Ltd., Microsoft Corp. has made another strategic purchase to boost its cloud capabilities.

The company today announced the acquisition of Movere Inc., a software provider based out of Bellevue, Washington that sells an infrastructure assessment platform. The product enables enterprises to take stock of their technology assets without sinking person-hours into a laborious manual review.

These types of assessments serve an important purpose for infrastructure teams. Having an up-to-date view of the servers, applications and users in a corporate network allows administrators to find inefficiencies that would otherwise stay hidden. Operational visibility is also a basic requisite to maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture. 

More pertinently for Microsoft, enterprises perform infrastructure assessments as part of cloud migration projects to determine which workloads they should move off their on-premises hardware. Movere will make the task easier for organizations shifting applications to Azure.

The company’s software can map out a corporate network at a rate of more than a thousand servers per hour and then generate a visual asset breakdown for administrators. Movere also displays a wealth of related information, such as the hardware utilization of business applications and the times when usage spikes most commonly occur. Companies can employ this data to calculate how much cloud infrastructure they’d need to buy to run the same workloads off-premises. 

“Movere’s innovative discovery and assessment capabilities will complement Azure Migrate and our integrated partner solutions, making migration an easier process for our customers,” Jeremy Winter, the Microsoft director responsible for Azure’s management-as-a-service offerings, wrote in a blog post.

Lowering the entry barrier to adopting a cloud platform decreases migration costs and ultimately has the effect of encouraging adoption. The same rationale lies behind the partnership that Microsoft forged with data management giant Informatica LLC last month. Under the agreement, the companies will collaborate to help customers migrate analytics workloads to Microsoft’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse service. 

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