Microsoft Seeks to Tackle Legal and Compliance Challenges for Big Data with Acquisition

Today Microsoft has announced the acquisition of a company called Equivio. Equivio is a text analytics company that provides a product called Zoom. Zoom is a court-approved machine learning platform specifically designed to manage record retention compliance and data remediation, but also provide litigators with pertinent and timely case information. Equivio's customer list includes the DoJ, the FTC, KPMG, Deloitte, plus hundreds of law firms and corporations.

According to Microsoft, the company plans to integrate Equivio's solutions with Office 365 to make its current legal and compliance tools more intelligent.

Big Data is a continuing concern for many companies, knowing that there's aging information out there somewhere that needs to be centralized and managed. More and more solutions providers like Microsoft are trying to solve the Big Data problem by developing machine level AI (machine learning) that can automate management of the exponentially growing data.

Microsoft's investment in the legal arena for Big Data comes as no surprise as the software company continues to work toward bringing customer security and privacy under control.