Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has acquired Equivio, which offers machine learning technology for e-discovery and information governance. The company said it “plans to use Equivio's eDiscover and information governance tools to improve Office 365's offerings in these areas,” said Rajesh Jha, corporate vice president, Outlook and Office 365, on the “Official Microsoft Blog.”

“We are making this acquisition to help our customers tackle the legal and compliance challenges inherent in managing large quantities of email and documents,” he said.

The acquisition will help users “explore large, unstructured sets of data, and quickly find what is relevant,” said Jha. “It uses advanced text analytics to perform multi-dimensional analyses of data collections, intelligently sorting documents into themes, grouping near-duplicates, isolating unique data, and helping users quickly identify the documents they need.”