Microsoft is buying Parature, a customer-care service service provider, to bolster its Dynamics CRM line.

Microsoft is slated to announce the acquisition of the Herndon, Virg., company on January 7. Company officials declined to share financial terms of the deal.

Parature is a Microsoft partner. Its customer-care offering is cloud-based and used by customers like IBM, Ask.com and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Parature's serviceincludes mobile, social and reporting customer-service components.

Parature's offering will remain cloud-based and will be available both as a standalone service, as well as a product integrated with Dynamics CRM (on-premises) and CRM Online, Microsoft officials confirmed. Microsoft will have more to share about the roadmap for integrating Parature with its Dynamics family in the coming months.

Microsoft is positioning the Parature acquisition as its first outward-facing CRM acquisition. In the past couple of years, Microsoft has bought a couple of internal-facing CRM companies -- marketing-automation vendor MarketingPilot and analytics vendor Netbreeze -- to flesh out its CRM line.

The 100 Herndon-based Parature employees will be joining Microsoft as part of the acquisition, Microsoft officials said. The deal is expected to close in 30 days. Parature has 70 million users worldwide, according to Microsoft officials.