Microsoft Corporation has confirmed its intention to take over the email startup Acompli, offering its users a hassle-free, productive mobile email solution. The acquisition was confirmed by the startup through a blog post yesterday.
Acompli was founded 18 months ago with the goal of improving the way business emails are handled on the go, giving birth to the product that has ever since become a solution loved and trusted by its users. The company has started discussions with Microsoft about integrating their product with their Office 365 platform, at the same time offering their users access to other companies’ products – like iCloud, Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. The conversation has seemingly escalated into the acquisition announced yesterday. According to Valuewalk, the Redmond giant has paid over $200 million for Acompli.
Acompli had several features that were attractive for Microsoft Corporation, like its support for Microsoft Exchange, its one-tap calendar integration, and easy access to recent files and messages. It is a professionally designed piece of software with a lot of potential – unfortunately not available for Windows Phone (but this will hopefully change in the near future). Acompli is similar to Microsoft’s own Outlook on the desktop – a combination of calendar, contacts and email all in one. Microsoft did not outline its plans for Acompli, but it will probably integrate the app into its Office 365 platform.
The Acompli team has promised not to let its users down, and continue offering them the best email application platform across all services after it integrates with Microsoft Corporation. It will have some tough competition – Google has recently launched its own re-imagination of email called Inbox, and IBM has also announced a unified platform for business communication, collaboration and scheduling called Verse. All these new product launches show that email has not been rendered obsolete, especially in business environments, but it needs a complete makeover to offer users what they need today.