Three weeks after picking up Israeli cybersecurity specialist Hexadite Ltd. for a reported $100 million, Microsoft Corp. is marking yet another acquisition in the country.

The technology giant today announced that it has entered an agreement to buy Cloudyn Software Ltd., a startup focused on helping organizations  manage their off-premises infrastructure. Insiders first leaked word of the deal to Israeli business journal Calcalist in May, claiming that Microsoft is shelling out between $50 million and $70 million. The company didn’t share any financial details in the announcement, but a new report from TechCrunch reaffirmed the price range original provided by the tipsters.

The deal should help Microsoft better address a key trend in the public cloud: the rise of multicloud environments. Cloudyn sells software that allows companies to manage the resources they rent on different infrastructure as a service platforms through a central interface. The dashboard shows expenditures and provides an extensive set of features for tackling excessive spending, including a recommendation engine that automatically highlights saving opportunities.

Cloudyn’s platform has apparently proven quite effective in the field. Jeremy Winter, an executive with Microsoft’s cloud division, wrote in today’s acquisition announcement that one Fortune 500 company has seen a 286 percent return on investment from Cloudyn’s ability to make their cloud spending more efficient.

The big question that Cloudyn’s customers will be asking in the wake of the deal is how the technology giant plans to use its software. Of particular note is the fact the product’s centralized management capabilities hinge on its support for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud, Google Inc.’s public cloud and other platforms that compete with Microsoft’s Azure. The fate of this feature may now be uncertain.

But while Microsoft didn’t share its development plans, the importance of multiprovider support to Cloudyn’s value proposition means there’s reason for optimism. It will ultimately depend on how committed the technology giant is to supporting companies that use multiple public clouds, which constitute a fast-growing part of the market.

George Gilbert, an analyst with Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, said he thinks the multicloud capability was the primary attraction. “It gives Microsoft visibility into customers’ use of AWS and Google,” he said. “Microsoft can use that intelligence in recommending competitive services and, more important, in targeting discounts to particular customers.”

Microsoft certainly wouldn’t be the first major provider to target this area. Last year, Google introduced a monitoring service that can provide visibility not only into workloads running on its own cloud platform but also AWS deployments.

Image: Microsoft