Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., speaks during the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in Seattle, Washington, USA, on Monday, May 7, 2018. The Build conference, marking its second consecutive year in Seattle, should emphasize on technologies cloud services and artificial intelligence resources in those services.
Grant Hindsley | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft announced Monday that it will contribute cloud-based data storage and computing power to Terra, a software project that allows industry and academic researchers to collaborate on large-scale analysis of health information.
In fact, the life sciences company operating under Google, Alphabet, co-developed Terra and has been using it for the past three years. Terra’s other partner is the Broad Institute, a nonprofit health research institution that Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established in 2004.
The service ran on Google’s cloud infrastructure. The groups will now also deploy Terra on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
The move is an example of Google Cloud’s struggles to gain traction against its larger cloud competitors, as well as Microsoft’s success in enlisting a wide range of Azure partners across all industries. In 2019, the public cloud services market grew 37% over the previous year, with Microsoft owning around 18% and Amazon, the largest player, controlling 45%, according to industry research firm estimates. Gartner technology. Google held 5% of the market. More recent figures are not available.
“I think there are several aspects of Azure that are very attractive,” said Anthony Philippakis, director of data at the Broad Institute. “When we look at how reliable they are across the entire life sciences ecosystem, it’s incredible. Almost all healthcare systems run on Microsoft products.”
Bringing Terra to Azure could lead to significant software adoption, he said. Microsoft has more than 168,000 partners in health and life sciences, said Dr. / Greg Moore, a corporate vice president at Microsoft who has previously worked with healthcare in Google’s cloud division. In 2019, 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue came from partners, according to the company.
Microsoft’s decision to contribute Terra along with the Broad Institute and Verily comes less than a year after launching a Cloud for Health Care package including Azure and the Teams communication app. Healthcare represents an industry where Microsoft can increase its revenue and profit, RBC analysts wrote in a November report.
The emergence of the coronavirus “has made us more aware than ever” as it is critical for researchers from various organizations to collaborate, rather than relying on narrower data sets and computing resources that are kept in place, said Clare Bernard, senior director the Broad Institute.
Philippakis did not specify whether the software could be made available on Amazon Web Services.
“Any decision on whether to incorporate future clouds will be made jointly between Broad, Verily and Microsoft,” he said.
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