Microsoft has bought cloud migration specialist Movere for an undisclosed sum, snapping up a partner it has worked closely with since 2008 and removing a firm from the market that has a track record of supporting major migrations to rival AWS.

Microsoft already has its existing Azure Migrate offering, which lets potential customers estimate the costs of running data centres in Azure by assessing up to 35,000 VMware VMs and 10,000 Hyper-V VMs per project, and checking migration readiness.

What Does Movere Do?

Movere, founded in 2008, specialises in mapping global enterprise IT environments to suggest the most economical resource-efficient virtual machines (VMs) and storage.

By using performance data instead of the traditional “lift and shift” approach, Movere claims that it typically saves enterprise customers 70 percent on compute costs.

It works with both potential Azure and AWS customers on application dependency mapping and migrations, however, recently helping Malaysian oil and gas giant Petronas move to AWS and assess its licensing portfolio. Microsoft ownership is likely, in future, to result in a much more Azure-focussed customer emphasis.

By assessing what is in a customer environment, from servers to devices to containers, along the capacity these are being used at, and what drives consumption, it helps users optimise how they migrate to the cloud (“as offers and pricing vary by region the key to keeping your cloud spending at bay is to evaluate all of the factors simultaneously.”)

Azure management’s partner director, said in a blog post published late Wednesday: “Movere’s innovative discovery and assessment capabilities will complement Azure Migrate and our integrated partner solutions… We aim to streamline our customers’ journey to the cloud.”

Movere CEO Kristin Ireland said: “On our [own] journey to cloud, we made mistakes that cost us valuable time and resources that we didn’t have. As we spread our wings in the cloud, we realized the cloud was the embodiment of Movere – the unleashing of business potential through migration – we knew we had to be part of that journey.”