Microsoft Corp. has purchased Clear Software Inc., a developer of tools for speeding up complex business tasks that involve multiple applications.

Microsoft announced the acquisition today. The deal is aimed at enhancing the capabilities of the company’s Microsoft Power Platform product suite.

Two of the most important offerings in the product suite are the Power Apps and Power Automate cloud services. Both services are designed to help companies automate repetitive business chores such as copying sales records between databases. However, the offerings focus on different sets of use cases. 

Power Apps allows business users to build custom applications to streamline repetitive aspects of their day-to-day work. Power Automate, meanwhile, is geared more toward building automation workflows than applications. There are a few key differences between the two software categories. A workflow doesn’t necessarily have a user interface like applications do and is often focused on a narrower set of tasks, or potentially just a single action. As a result, workflows are more likely to be used for automating back-office processes. 

But though the use cases they target often vary, applications and workflows have the same core function: to process business data. As a result, they both require the ability to integrate with the systems in which a company’s business data is kept. That’s the task Microsoft is looking to ease for its customers with the acquisition of Clear Software.

Clear Software offers two software products that simplify business tasks involving information spread across multiple systems. The first product, ClearProcess, allows automation applications and workflows to more easily work with data in systems of record such as an enterprise resource planning platform. Clear Software’s other offering is called ClearWork and allows a company’s employees to access multiple applications and their data via a single, centralized webpage.

Microsoft will use the company’s technology to enhance Power Apps and Power Automate. 

Microsoft hasn’t shared specific details on exactly what feature improvements customers can expect. But it did point out that Clear Software’s products provide extensive integrations with popular Oracle Corp. and SAP SE business applications, which are widely used by enterprises to manage their business data. Those integrations play a central role in Microsoft’s plans for the acquisition. 

“The Clear Software integrations will make it a more seamless experience to use Power Apps and Power Automate to build business applications and automations over complex systems like SAP and Oracle,” Stephen Siciliano, partner general manager for Power Automate, wrote in a blog post today.

Microsoft didn’t disclose the acquisition’s financial terms. 

Photo: Microsoft