News

Microsoft Bolsters Dynamics 365 with Suplari Acquisition

• By Kurt Mackie
• July 28, 2021

An acquisition announced by Microsoft on Wednesday promises to bring AI solutions for assessing supply-chain spending to the Dynamics 365 product.

Microsoft is acquiring Seattle-based Suplari for an undisclosed amount. Nothing changes for existing Suplari customers, the announcement explained. Suplari's Spend Intelligence Cloud offering, used to assess such spending, will be continuing as a service even after Microsoft's acquisition.

Nikesh Parekh, Suplari's CEO, explained that the whole Suplari team is joining Microsoft to run the Suplari Spend Intelligence Cloud service, per this Suplari announcement:

We are excited for the new road ahead with Microsoft. I am ecstatic to report that 100% of our team is continuing to work together to extend Suplari's Spend Intelligence Cloud at Microsoft. Customers can continue to expect the same great product experience from Suplari going forward as part of Microsoft. Given Microsoft's AI, cloud and data investments, customers can expect that Suplari will continue to deliver more AI-driven, predictive & prescriptive insights and integrated workflows for finance, procurement, & supply chain teams.

Suplari's solutions will be added to existing capabilities in Dynamics 365, which is Microsoft's enterprise resource planning service. The integration will provide Dynamics 365 customers with simple access to spending information, supplemented by more than 175 financial insights from Suplari's "AI-powered library." Moreover, Microsoft is promising the integration will provide access to "clean" data from internal operations, as well as from external suppliers.

Suplari's solutions check to see if data used in an analysis is "correct, complete and relevant," which is its clean-data process. It checks the data against "prebuilt insights" and then produces possible actions to take, per Suplari's site description.

Suplari solutions have been used to monitor things like ground transportation costs, looking for possible savings. The idea is to deliver an "always-on" continuous assessment of supply-chain spending data via algorithms.

Microsoft's announcement noted that Suplari's solutions can transform data from sometimes siloed sources, "such as contracts, purchase orders, invoices, expenses and supplier risk."

Suplari started in 2016 to support organizations with "data trapped in antiquated enterprise systems," Parekh explained. Suplari's solutions now address "more than $180B in spend across millions of transactions per month for global corporations," Parekh added.