Microsoft has made no secret its new lazer focus on mobile. When taking the helm at Microsoft earlier this year, new CEO Satya Nadella made known that Microsoft’s new reality would be a world that’s “mobile-first, cloud-first“. Though Microsoft seems to have the cloud part of the equation in place, their effort to shift to mobile has shown promise at points, but has had many well-known misses. Their acquisition this week of Capptain, cofounded six years ago by Laurent Lathieyre, should help them to get a much deeper and richer understanding of user behavior within apps. In addition to analyzing these behaviors, Capptain offers targeted push notifications with specially-targeted messages, announcements or offers.
In addition to helping Microsoft better understand in-app user behavior, Microsoft stressed on their blog that Capptain will also play an important role in their end-to-end story for mobile app development, namely real-time and push analytics. The effort to integrate Capptain into the wider suite of Microsoft Azure services is now underway and will enable “enterprises not only to build mobile apps to engage customers and employees, but also to analyze and optimize that engagement.”
Incidentally, as noted out by Frenchweb, the Capptain deal brings their number of French startup acquisitions to 5 (since 2006). The others were MotionBridge (2006), Tellme Networks (2007), Musiwave (2007), ScreenTonic (2007), and Ciao (eventually sold to LeGuide.com in 2012).
I wrote a last month about their evolving and more innovative approach to search and voice, which is obviously an extremely important part of their mobile transformation. Buying Capptain looks to be another important step on their journey.