Microsoft Announces PhoneFactor Acquisition

Today Microsoft announced that it has purchased PhoneFactor, a company that specializes in phone-based multi-factor authentication. Unlike a lot of the acquisitions we've been hearing about lately, Microsoft is actually giving us details when it comes to what the company plans to do with PhoneFactor. According a blog post penned by Microsoft's Bharat Shah, Microsoft will "further integrate PhoneFactor's technology into its Active Directory, Windows Azure Active Directory and Office 365 products."

Microsoft had already been working with PhoneFactor before this acquisition, so it shouldn't come as much of a shocker that the big M decided to just buy PhoneFactor outright. Of course, PhoneFactor services more corporations aside from just Microsoft, but the good news is that PhoneFactor's existing customers won't be cut off. In a blog post of his own, PhoneFactor CEO Tim Sutton said that the company will remain open for business, so existing customers have nothing to worry about.

Indeed, in addition to further integrating PhoneFactor's serivces into its own products, it appears that Microsoft has plans to continue licensing the company's tech to other corporations. That's a smart move on Microsoft's part, and it stands to make a decent chunk of change by doing that, since so many other companies use PhoneFactor authentication for their own products.

This is also a big win for PhoneFactor, as it will be able to improve its services faster and offer them to a wider range of customers with Microsoft backing it up. Sutton even hints that details about these improvements will be coming shortly, so we'll be keeping an eye out for those. Oh, and in case you're wondering, neither company talked about how much Microsoft paid for PhoneFactor.