Microsoft’s $19.7bn acquisition of Nuance will help it expand its footprint in cloud business

Charles Abuede

After the 2019 partnership, Microsoft Corporation has announced its acquisition of Nuance Communications, an artificial Intelligence (AI) and speech technology company for the sum of $19.7 billion in a deal that will help Microsoft expand its footprint in cloud business especially for its customers in the areas of healthcare and enterprise segments.

The announcement which was made by the U.S. tech giant on Monday revealed that it is in pursuit of the position by becoming a leader in the vertical cloud solutions market in prominent industries, such as healthcare.

Satya Nadella, the chief executive, Microsoft Corporations, in his comment on the deal, said the acquisition will help the tech giant expand leadership across various industry enterprise and biometric security.

“This acquisition brings our technology directly into the physician and patient loop, which is central to all healthcare delivery. The acquisition will also expand our leadership in cross-industry enterprise AI and biometric security,” he said.

Meanwhile, this news is coming after Microsoft reported that it was in talks to buy Discord for over 7.24 billion pounds but this current move by Microsoft, according to analysts, could help it fill in crucial gaps when it comes to both speech recognition and health data. Though, Microsoft had prior to this time partnered the leading AI and speech tech company for automated clinical administrative processes which include health data documentations in 2019.

Nuance is broadly known in the speech technology segment as a pioneer who also helped Apple Inc. launch its world-famous voice assistant, Siri. The American multinational which provides intelligent solutions, such as medical transcription, clinical speech recognition, and medical imaging, to roughly 77 per cent of the hospitals in the United States has, in recent years, doubled down on artificial intelligence in the healthcare and enterprise sector. Nuance also spun off and sold several of its business units in past years that were struggling to generate commendable profits.