While the rest of the industry was winding down for the weekend, Microsoft Corp. marked last Friday with the announcement of its latest acquisition, a startup called Metanautix Inc. that has developed a service for integrating data from disparate systems. Its main selling point is an indexing mechanism that catalogs the contents of every source in a unified register through which entries can be merged without having to be moved to the same place first.

Removing the need for centralization spares organizations the hassle of shuffling their sizable data troves back and forth from various repositories to support internal analytics efforts, thereby freeing up bandwidth and giving users faster access to information at the same stroke. But perhaps most importantly, Metanautix says that its software also helps reduce the complexity of the integration workflow in the process, which has historically been one of the main stumbling blocks for large-scale business intelligence projects.

Microsoft plans to incorporate the technology into its recently introduced Cortana Analytics Suite, a cloud-based bundle comprised of its popular virtual assistant and a selection data processing services from Azure that currently require cataloging and integration to be carried out in separate interfaces. Metanautix will enable Redmond to unify its value proposition under a single pane of glass and thereby level the playing field against the pipelining engine in Amazon’s rivaling platform. The effort is set to place a particular emphasis on handling data kept in SQL Server, the database of choice for the Windows shops that constitute its core market.

Microsoft has provided few other details about the acquisition. However, the fact that Metanautix raised only $7 million in outside funding and listed just one customer case study on its website before it was taken down allows for certain assumptions to be made about the terms of the transaction. For one, the amount that changed hands probably didn’t exceed the low eight-figures, a bargain given the central role that the startup’s technology is set to play in Redmond’s cloud strategy.

Image via Geralt