Microsoft made bold moves this year to position its voice assistant Cortana for enterprise customers, analyst Raul Castanon-Martinez said, and is uniquely poised to overtake competitors Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant in the workplace. Castanon-Martinez's firm 451 Research estimates voice user interfaces and digital assistants are among the top technologies organizations will adopt in the next two years – and Microsoft is in the best position to gain their business, he said. "Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant dominate the market on the consumer side, but Microsoft has a leg up in the enterprise, given its dominant position with its productivity and collaboration product portfolios," Castanon-Martinez said. Competition in the workplace is the latest development in the relationship between Alexa and Cortana. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year said the company no longer sees Cortana as a competitor to Amazon's Alexa.

"Wand Labs' technology and talent will strengthen our position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence, where we bring together the power of human language with advanced machine intelligence -- connecting people to knowledge, information, services and other people in more relevant and natural ways," David Ku, corporate vice president of the Information Platform Group at Microsoft, said in statement. "It builds on and extends the power of the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms to empower developers everywhere." "The acquisition of Wand Labs will support Microsoft's chatbots strategy, which the company refers to as "conversations as a platform," Raul Castanon-Martinez, senior Analyst, enterprise mobility, 451 Research told us today. "This is CEO Satya Nadella's first big initiative." Castanon-Martinez said although there are redundancies in the technology developed by Wand Labs and Microsoft's own assets, the acquisition will also provide Microsoft with a talented group of individuals with expertise in conversational interfaces. This will help Microsoft significantly expand the team of experts that are currently working on its conversation-as-a-platform strategy, he said. "This will be critical moving forward; Microsoft has ambitious goals to become the leader in this space [and] the industry is moving at a fast pace.