Text analytics service Equivio has been acquired by Microsoft

Equivio is a service for legal and compliance that utilizes various machine-learning techniques in order to analyze documents and identify what relevance they might have to the needs of Equivio’s clients. Microsoft has just acquired the company for an undisclosed amount and intends to use this technology to help improve Office 365’s capabilities. 

Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Equivio, a text analytics service for legal and compliance that uses machine-learning techniques to identify documents relevant to their legal and compliance needs. Microsoft plans to use Equivio’s eDiscover and information governance tools to improve Office 365’s offerings in these areas. “We are making this acquisition to help our customers tackle the legal and compliance challenges inherent in managing large quantities of email and documents,” writes Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Outlook and Office 365 Rajesh Jha in today’s announcement. “Traditional techniques for finding relevant documents are falling behind as the growth of data outpaces peoples’ ability to manually process it.”