News

Microsoft Power Platform Gets a Boost with Clear Software Acquisition

• By Kurt Mackie
• October 25, 2021

Microsoft has acquired Zionsville, Ind.-based Clear Software, planning to incorporate its low-code technology into the Microsoft Power Platform, the companies announced Friday.

Clear Software provides a service and various business process APIs designed to enable low-code integrations with complex business software products. The business software products supported include "SAP, Oracle EBS, Salesforce, Workday, PeopleSoft" and more, per a Clear Software FAQ.

There are two "integration platform as a service" products offered by Clear Software, namely ClearProcess and ClearWork. ClearProcess is the company's low-code integration solutions, based on APIs. The company provides more than 6,000 prebuilt APIs for integration with business software products. ClearWork is the company's low-code business process management software, which includes more than 200 prebuilt business processes. The company claims to address "90% to 95%" of business processes with ClearWork.    

Clear Software customers get access to more than 4,000 SAP automations, more than 500 Oracle E-Business Suite automations and more than 300 Salesforce automations, according to the company's Web site description. The solutions are delivered via a cloud-based service. End users access them via a Web browser.

Organizations typically use Clear Software solutions to automate sales-order entry, as well as invoicing and payments. Its solutions also get used to track vendor invoicing and to automate purchase-order entry processes. Document scanning and processing is another typical automation area. The software also can clean data for processing. It's also used for streamlining contact center processes.

Clear Software's origins stem from consultants at Deloitte and Accenture who had been "implementing ERP [enterprise resource planning] software at some of the largest organizations in the world," per its site description. The idea was to address common user problems and create solutions that could scale and survive business product software updates.

Microsoft's is acquiring Clear Software to bolster its Power Platform low-code, no-code dev and automation products for businesses (namely, Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents). Clear Software's API and expertise will be used to "strengthen Microsoft Power Platform's integration with outside systems," the announcement indicated.

"The Clear Software integrations will make it a more seamless experience to use Power Apps and Power Automate to build business applications and automations over complex systems like SAP and Oracle," Microsoft added.

Microsoft is planning to share Clear Software's prebuilt solutions and integrations with Power Platform customers at some undisclosed point.

The terms of the deal weren't announced. It's not clear how current Clear Software customers may be affected. A short statement from Clear Software merely indicated that company personnel are "excited" to have joined Microsoft.