In a completely planned and risk-free manner, Microsoft has bought California based Prodiance Corp. This company used to be a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner before the integration in to Microsoft itself. So they are already quite familiar with the Redmond giant.

Microsoft Now Managing Its Own Risks, Excel To Do The Same

Prodiance Corp. produced a risk management suite called Enterprise Risk Manager and it was made to work well with Excel spreadsheets. Going by what Prodiance has to say about their product, it’s apparent that the software kept a check on important, “mission critical” spreadsheets and helped organizations to solve compliance issues, perform risk management, do inventory, etc.

Microsoft’s aim at buying off this company is quite clear — make Excel do all or most of these things by it self. Thus making Excel a be all and end all program for enterprise customers. If Excel truly becomes good at these things without losing out what it already does well, there will definitely be a lot more takers for it.

There are also talks of Microsoft integrating some of the Prodiance’s features in to Share Point as well. Microsoft’s aim is similar to what the stand alone software did — monitor and remedy spreadsheets.

The Deal

According to the agreement between Microsoft and the company, Prodiance will not be moving from Pleasanton. They will become a fully owned subsidiary of Microsoft. The company is trying to bring some Prodiance employees to Redmond. Neither of the companies are talking money right now but that will come out soon enough.

As for Prodiance’s existing customer base, they are entitled to their current service contracts and they are also allowed to buy more licenses. The rest however should wait till the dust settles down around the deal and more details emerge.

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