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Microsoft continued its pattern of acquisition of smaller healthcare software providers for its Amalga healthcare unit with today’s announcement of the acquisition of Sentillion:
Microsoft Corp. today announced that it intends to acquire Sentillion Inc., a privately held company specializing in software for the healthcare industry. Combining Sentillion’s products with Microsoft Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS) will make it easier for healthcare professionals to deliver better patient care by streamlining access to multiple IT applications and patient data.
Sentillion will continue to sell and support its products to new and existing customers while Microsoft invests in the long-term evolution of the combined portfolio of Sentillion and Microsoft health solutions. Sentillion will also continue to operate out of its corporate headquarters in Andover, Mass. The acquisition is expected to close in early calendar year 2010. Financial terms were not disclosed.
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By combining Sentillion’s context management and single sign-on technologies with Amalga UIS, a real-time data aggregation solution, Microsoft aims to give clinicians new insight about patients in real time and enable them to perform the appropriate task with unprecedented speed. At the same time, the workflow of clinicians will be simplified, allowing them to spend less time navigating different IT systems and more time with patients.
Microsoft has announced the acquisition of "certain" assets (for an unspecified amount) of Rosetta Biosoftware, a business unit of Rosetta Inpharmatics LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck & Co. Inc.
The deal allows Microsoft to incorporate genetic, genomic, metabolomic and proteomics data management software into the Microsoft Amalga Life Sciences platform for enhanced translational research capabilities. In addition, Microsoft will establish a strategic relationship with Merck to enhance the Amalga Life Sciences platform to meet emerging pharmaceutical research needs.
…The deal is expected to close at the end of June 2009, and the new Amalga Life Sciences platform incorporating Rosetta Biosoftware technologies is slated to be available in early 2010. Microsoft is pursuing hiring Rosetta Biosoftware employees who can fill roles that are critical to the effective incorporation of Rosetta Biosoftware technologies into the Amalga Life Sciences platform. Until the deal is closed, Rosetta Biosoftware will continue to operate as a business unit of Rosetta Inpharmatics LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Merck.
Microsoft rebranded its healthcare software offerings as Amalga in February 2008.
This week the US National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) are holding their annual convention and Microsoft was there touting their wares. The big Microsoft news was the announcement of some new reference content provider customers and the promise for later this year of DRM (AKA copy protection) for their Silverlight “Flash killer”:
Today Microsoft unveiled details of Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady, the content protection support coming later this year in Silverlight. Silverlight DRM builds on Microsoft’s extensive expertise and experience in content protection and support for hundreds of millions of media players and devices worldwide.
In addition to being compatible with the broadly deployed base of Windows Media DRM 10 content, Silverlight DRM will support live streaming, on-demand streaming and progressive downloads for connected experiences. With the extensibility and openness of Silverlight, third-party solution providers will also be able to build and offer content owners additional choices for their media protection needs.
Microsoft apparently intends to continue their dominance in commercial media DRM software and connoisseurs of the genre will recognize PlayReady as Microsoft’s DRM successor to the the ill-fated PlaysForSure technology that Microsoft threw overboard (along with some unfortunate partners) when they released the Zune.
Other announcements:
Microsoft announced last Wednesday that it was rebranding its disparate healthcare enterprise software offerings under the umbrella name “Amalga.” Here’s a rundown:
“Amalga, the unified intelligence system, is being targeted for release to manufacturing in the first half of calendar year 2008. An early-adopter customer program is being established for the released versions of Amalga HIS and Amalga RIS/PACS, which are focused on healthcare providers in countries outside the United States.”
