Microsoft Corp. is doubling down on the lucrative education technology market with the acquisition of DataSense, a platform that helps schools manage their digital records.

The company is buying the platform from BrightBytes Inc., a San Francisco-based software maker. Microsoft didn’t share the financial terms of the deal in today’s announcement but divulged it will also absorb the development team behind DataSense. BrightBytes will continue to operate independently and focus on its other product, an analytics tool called Clarity likewise aimed at educational institutions.

DataSense enables schools to share records between the applications they rely on to support students. It addresses the technical challenges involved in moving data between normally disparate education systems, which mirror the difficulties enterprises face when performing the same task with their own applications.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks is that different systems to tend store information in different ways. DataSense can automatically convert records into a standardized format and transmit them to a wide range of education systems using a library of ready-made connectors, which support hundred of applications. The platform also checks the data for errors in the process to ensure accuracy.

According to BrightBytes, DataSense is used to process the information of millions of students across hundreds of school districts. Microsoft plans to integrate the platform into Azure in a bid to make its public cloud more attractive for education sector customers.

“With the integration of DataSense into Microsoft’s suite of products, we will help educational institutions – and school and district IT leaders in particular – better collect, manage and explicitly control access to their data within Azure to help drive the best possible learning outcomes for their students,” Steve Liffick, Microsoft’s general manager of education strategy and platform, wrote in a blog post.

The acquisition of DataSense comes days after Microsoft introduced an entire set of new products for schools. The company unveiled seven affordable, partner-developed Windows 10 laptops designed for use by students, a complementary stylus and a few Office 365 enhancements aimed at making teachers’ work easier.

Microsoft’s biggest competitor in the education market is Google LLC, which dominates the classroom with its low-cost Chromebooks. The search giant also offers a version of G Suite for schools that directly competes with Office 365.

Photo: Microsoft