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Microsoft adds another company to its healthcare portfolio

Microsoft is continuing to add to its family of healthcare sofware and services with yet another purchase: Sentillion Inc. On December 10, Microsoft announced its intentions to purchase for an undisclosed amount the privately held Andover, Mass.-based maker of identity- and access-management software for the healthcare industry.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft is continuing to add to its family of healthcare sofware and services with yet another purchase: Sentillion Inc.

On December 10, Microsoft announced its intentions to purchase for an undisclosed amount the privately held Andover, Mass.-based maker of identity- and access-management software for the healthcare industry.

Microsoft officials said they plan to integrate Sentillion's products with MIcrosoft's Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS). (Amalga is based on the Azyxxi assets Microsoft bought back in 2006.)

Healthcare is the only vertical software and services market where Microsoft (so far) is investing in a major way.

Microsoft has a software/service platform known as HealthVault, which offers consumers and their medical practitioners access to electronic healthcare records. The service component of HealthVault is one of a handful of Microsoft services that already is hosted on top of Azure. Amalga UIS is one of the main elements of Microsoft’s enterprise health-information-system platform. Microsoft integrated HealthVault with Amalga earlier this year.

Sentillion will continue to sell and support customers of its products, while Microsoft "invests in the long-term evolution" of the integrated wares, according to the press release. Microsoft's purchase is expected to be finalized in calendar 2010, the release says.

Here are a few more details about Microsoft's plans for Sentillion from today's release:

"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."

I'm wondering how Microsoft's own identity- and access-management wares (the recently announced Windows Identity Foundation and other remaining "Geneva" components) play in here.  No mention so far.

Update: From a December 10 post to the Forefront Team Blog:

"This ties to our efforts in identity & access management - part of the Business Ready Security strategy - to deliver capabilities in the Active Directory platform, and through next-generation products, such as the Microsoft Forefront Identity Manager 2010.

"The (Sentillion) acquisition brings complementary assets to Microsoft in the areas of single sign-on (SSO), user provisioning and context management that are focused on the healthcare industry. As we integrate Sentillion into Microsoft in the coming months, we will further explore synergies with Microsoft’s identity and access management solutions, such as our Forefront products."

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