Microsoft Corp.’s public cloud could become much better-equipped to store and analyze data from the connected universe thanks to its newly announced acquisition of Solair Sri. Founded in 2011, the Italian startup offers a line of managed services designed to automate the tougher aspects of processing machine-generated transmissions.

The lynchpin of the suite is a physical network gateway that has to be deployed in the vicinity of the sensors or other Internet-connected equipment an organization seeks to tap. Once it’s set up, the device opens a bidirectional line of communications that enables administrators to specify what data they wish to collect from the local gear along the way it should be transmitted. The gateway then starts sending the filtered information to Solair’s platform-as-a-service environment, where a company can create and deploy custom applications to handle the analysis.

The platform comes with seven pre-implemented software modules that aim to speed development by providing a ready-made foundation on which organizations may build their services. Much of the roster is dedicated to tasks such as collecting usage data and managing documentation that crop up in almost every customer project, while the other extensions focus on more specialized use cases limited to only certain industries. Among them is an inventory tracking plug-in designed to help optimize the quantity and variety of of goods in dispensing machines.

One Solair customer, coffee machine maker Rancilio Group, uses its services to help venues find out when an ingredient is about to run out so they can perform a refill before customers start complaining. And The Aiwa Corporation relies on the startup’s platform-as-a-service environment to support operations in its Japanese electronics factories. Microsoft plans on integrating the technology into its Azure IoT Suite to try and make the offering more appealing for such vertical use cases.

The fact that Solair already runs its suite on Azure should make the task somewhat easier for Redmond, which means that customers can expect access to its capabilities sooner rather than later. But it will probably still take at least a quarter or two for the software giant’s engineers to complete the project given the scope of the startup’s feature set.

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