In a blog post, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Ally, a start-up that is known to provide software that helps companies measure their progress against OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and achieve their goals. The financial details of the acquisition were not finalized.
According to the maker of the Windows operating systems, Ally will be joining its Viva family as “part of our employee experience platform (EXP) designed to help companies embrace the new digital work life.” This will, in turn, provide a more transparent way to communicate company goals and objectives to employees.
What is Viva? It is said to be an “employee experience platform” that is powered by Microsoft 365. According to Microsoft, it brings learning, insights, communications, and resources together on one platform, and includes four main categories – Topics, Connections, Learning, and Insights. It is meant to help companies with employee onboarding and engagement and help organizations foster a culture of human connection, growth, well-being, and success.
Where does Ally come in? Its technology will become the core of a fifth Viva module over the next year, and Microsoft plans to improve the integration between Ally.io’s technology and Teams and integrate it with Office, Power BI, and the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps and services.
“Aligning employee work to the company’s strategic mission and core priorities is top of mind for every organization. To do this, leaders need to invest in tools that communicate transparency around big company bets and create ways to cascade aspirational goals and report results at all levels of an organization,” Kirk Koenigsbauer, COO and Corporate VP, Experiences and Devices said in the blog post.
The acquisition of Ally is a testament to Microsoft’s focus on productivity. The three-year-old Ally enables to operate with the organizational alignment, agility, focus, and transparency required to match the fast pace needs of evolving markets. Its software integrates with other collaboration tools including Slack, Jira, Smartsheet, Asana, and others. It has been adopted by over 1,000 leading high-tech, manufacturing, financial services, and healthcare businesses across more than 80 countries.
The success of Ally shows the growth (and importance) of the OKR sector. As times are changing, more and more companies are laying emphasis on their productivity, and the shift to a hybrid workplace has brought new challenges, like the importance of keeping the leaders, teams, and individuals on the same page and the need for visibility and clarity in the entire work process.
