The number of companies to have been swept up in Microsoft Corp.’s shopping spree since the beginning of the year is now officially up to nine thanks to the purchase of an outfit called FieldOne Systems LLC in a deal meant to bolster its Dynamics CRM. Although unexpected, the transaction doesn’t come as too big of a surprise in the grand scheme of things.

The New Jersey-based partner-turned-asset has developed a cloud-based platform that promises to help organizations automate the delivery of field services. Its value proposition includes features for optimizing task assignment based on factors such as which representative is closest to a given customer site and a mobile client that helps with the distribution of work orders and other project details.

FieldOne is hardly the only the only vendor – nor the most well-established , for the matter – to provide such functionality, but does stand out by the fact its platform is built entirely upon Dynamics CRM. And as if that wasn’t convenient enough for Microsoft’s acquisition integration experts, the company was recently also accepted into its top-tier cloud partner program.

The high degree of cooperation and access established among the companies as a result should help ease the completion of the deal even further, which should potentially enable Redmond to push through with its plans for field service management much faster. Bob Stutz, the head of the Dynamics CRM unit, said that Redmond plans to enhance FieldOne core capabilities with its own machine learning and predictive analytics technology.

That’s potentially very good news for customers. The ability to, say, forecast traffic trends based on historical activity in a certain area could help determine the fastest route for a service representative to get to a client location and thus significantly streamline field operations. Stutz hinted that Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant will be added into the mix as well, which in turn should help those representations access that information faster, shaving yet more valuable time off the support schedule.

Providing all of that natively in  Dynamics CRM Online has the potential to give Microsoft a needed edge over arch-nemesis Salesforce Inc., which relies on partners for field service management functionality. At least for the time being, anyway. With Oracle Corp. and now Redmond too touting an integrated value proposition, the cloud giant is more than likely to try and change that, perhaps even with an acquisition of its own.

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