Continuing an acquisition streak that has seen it buy at least three companies so far this year, Microsoft Corp. today announced the purchase of ADRM Software Inc., a firm focused on helping large enterprises manage their data.

North Carolina-based ADRM has been in business for three decades. The firm sells data models, the blueprints enterprises use to organize information they want to process and standardize it in a common format. Data models are a core building block of analytics projects, as well as an essential part of many other use cases that involve managing important business information on a large scale.

ADRM’s website states that it has worked with Microsoft for more than a decade on joint customer projects. The North Carolina firm says its collaboration with Microsoft spanned the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

ADRM’s main specialty is making data models for industry-specific use cases such as organizing patient data or creating a unified model of a manufacturer’s core business metrics. It claims to have amassed a data model library spanning 65 areas different across 10 industry groups. Buying the firm will enable Microsoft to absorb these models and make them directly available to customers in vertical markets without having to depend on an external partner.

“Together with Microsoft Azure, these capabilities will be delivered at scale, enabling our customers to accelerate digital progress, and reduce risk in a variety of major initiatives,” Ravi Krishnaswamy, corporate vice president of Azure Global Industry, wrote in a blog post today.

ADRM Chief Executive Kevin Schofield added in a LinkedIn post that his company’s team has joined the Azure global engineering organization. “As we worked closely with the Azure team during the past year, we became very enthusiastic about the tremendous additional acceleration we can unlock for enterprise customers by combining ADRM’s comprehensive industry data models with the limitless storage and compute from Azure,” he wrote.

The acquisition continues a recent trend of cloud giants buying firms with solutions that can make their cloud platforms easier to use. In February, Amazon Web Services Inc. reportedly picked up DataRow, the developer of a program that made it simpler to create visualizations from records stored in Amazon Redshift. Also in February, Google LLC bought a firm called Cornerstone Technology B.V. to help companies move mainframe applications to Google Cloud faster. 

Microsoft has made several acquisitions of its own this year. It purchased British robotic process automation provider Softomotive Ltd. in May after inking deals to acquire Affirmed Networks Inc. and Metaswitch Networks Ltd, which both make network management software for telecommunications companies. Microsoft reportedly paid $1.35 billion for Affirmed Networks. 

Image: Microsoft