Microsoft Acquires Cloud Customer Service Player Parature

Software giant Microsoft will announce tomorrow that it has acquired Parature, a cloud-based provider of customer service software.

Parature, based in Herndon, Va., had raised about $30 million from venture capital firms including Accel Partners, Sierra Ventures and Valhalla Partners. A report in TechCrunch pegged the purchase price at $100 million, but neither Microsoft nor Parature confirmed that.

Its software-as-a-service platform for customer service is designed to reduce the cost and time commitment required to answer the same support questions that tend to come up over and over.

Last year it announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate its software with Dynamics, Microsoft’s customer relationship management platform, which is a fancy way of saying it’s Redmond’s answer to Salesforce.com. It had built up a solid business with 70 million end users around the world and more than 500 large companies and organizations using it, including Ask.com, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and IBM, among others.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.