Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gives a demonstration of Microsoft technology at Salesforce's tech conference, Dreamforce 2015 Business Insider/Julie Bort Microsoft has purchased "key technology and product assets" from Adxstudio, a seventeen-year-old small company that builds its products on top of the cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics CRM offering, the company announced in a blog post.

Dynamics CRM is Microsoft's competitor to Salesforce's main product, which helps salespeople track leads, sales, and other information.

Adxstudio describes itself as "the leading provider of web portal and application lifecycle management solutions built for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint and .NET platforms."

In plain English, Adxstudio's big idea is that you can take Microsoft Dynamics CRM and turn it into a browser-based web app. So if you were a big company, you could use it to turn Microsoft Dynamics CRM into a tech support portal. Or, a government agency could use it too build an app that would let citizens report stuff like downed power lines.

Microsoft has long been the laggard in the CRM space: Right now, Dynamics CRM is in fourth place behind Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle.

This investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes just few weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stage at Salesforce's Dreamforce event to reinforce the new partnership between the two — a partnership that will theoretically make it easier for customers to integrate Microsoft apps with Salesforce.

And yet, there are reports indicating that this partnership is already pretty rocky, perhaps because of the rumors that Microsoft was actually trying to buy Salesforce.

Earlier this year, Microsoft actually made a bunch of startup acquisitions to bolster Dynamics CRM, including Fusion Software, which added the ability to make questionaire forms to its portfolio.

Those Dynamics-focused acquisitons had slowed down a bit, and with the Salesforce partnership, it almost seemed like Microsoft was rethinking its investment in the space. But this Adxstudio acquisition shows that Microsoft is still taking CRM seriously.

Also of note: Since Microsoft just bought Adxstudio's product business, the company's consulting business will keep operating under the new name of Adoxio Business Solutions.