Summary: Microsoft inked a seven-year deal with US healthcare insurer Humana. Humana is a good win for Microsoft and its recently put together healthcare team. Humana had revenues of $56b in 2018 is a big player in the US market. Of course, when it comes to driving cloud adoption in enterprise verticals, Microsoft has major advantage over its rivals of being a known quantity: most enterprises have Enterprise Agreements with Microsoft (and quite often are delinquent in their licensing payments). Microsoft can offer trade-offs that make it tempting for its enterprise customers to move, say from Exchange to Office365. In this deal, Microsoft is named as Humana’s preferred cloud provider. First off, it will aggregate data on Azure. Next step is to migrate its 41k employees to Microsoft 365 suite (mail, collaboration and conferencing). The strategy is designed to maximize every opportunity to get as much of Humana’s IT infrastructure as possible. Start with mission-critical things like email and communications and then get the data on its cloud so that all the applications will be dependent on it and the integrated AI tools easily accessible. Finally, the two are to work together to develop virtual on-demand medical services. As part of the deal the two will fund a research and development project. Microsoft set up a dedicated unit Microsoft Healthcare, formalizing its NExT intiative in June 2018. Since then it has formed several high-profile partnerships with Novartis Walmart and Allscripts. Although Microsoft, as we said earlier, has the benefit of deep and long running relationships in this vertical, all its main rivals are targeting the area as well and any major account like Humana, will be keenly fought over.
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