The deal is the largest made by Microsoft in years and is expected to double its total addressable market in the healthcare provider space and bring it to nearly $500 billion. But the idea of an acquisition has attracted opposition from competitors over the last year, with the main concern being the fact that Nuance serves 77% of U.S. hospitals and in any of its deals could use customer data to advance its voice recognition system. Since big cloud vendors do not have unrestrained access to customers’ data for research and development, competitors claimed that Nuance would provide Microsoft with unrestrained access to such information in the 77% of hospitals it serves.

They also claimed that Microsoft could use the deal to force its Office suite of products on these providers by integrating Nuance’s technologies. As a result, the U.S. Justice Department opened an investigation into the impact of the deal early last year but later gave its approval for it in June. Then in October, the Australian Competition Commission conducted its own probe before allowing it to proceed.

The EU followed suit and came to the same conclusion in December that the deal would not raise competition concerns.

Because of these back-to-back investigations, Microsoft and Nuance pushed the expected completion date from the end of 2021 to the first quarter of 2022. The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority was the last to launch an investigation in January. Its approval this week cleared the last hurdle for the both companies to come together as one entity.

“Combining the power of Nuance’s deep vertical expertise and proven business outcomes across healthcare, financial services, retail, telecommunications and other industries with Microsoft’s global cloud ecosystems will enable us to accelerate our innovation and deploy our solutions more quickly, more seamlessly and at greater scale to solve our customers’ most pressing challenges,” said Mark Benjamin, CEO of Nuance.

The deal is the second largest for Microsoft, following its $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016.

Back to HCB News

Business Affairs Homepage