Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Corp., speaks at the Microsoft Developers Build Conference in Seattle, Washington, USA, on Monday, May 7, 2018. The Build conference, which marks the second consecutive year in Seattle, is expected to highlight about the company’s cloud technologies and the artificial intelligence functions within 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 will allow industry and academic researchers to collaborate on large-scale health information analysis.
Verily, the life sciences company operating under Google parent company Alphabet, has co-developed Terra and has been using it for the past three years. The other partner in Terra is the Broad Institute, a non-profit health research institution that Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded in 2004.
The service runs on Google’s cloud infrastructure. Now the groups will also deploy Terra in Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
The step in an example of Google Cloud’s struggle to get to grips with its larger cloud competitors, as well as Microsoft’s success in hiring a wide variety of Azure partners across a variety of industries. In 2019, the public cloud services market grew 37% from the previous year, with Microsoft controlling about 18% and Amazon, the largest player, controlling 45%, according to estimates by the technology industry research firm Gartner. Google controlled 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, Broad Institute’s Chief Data Officer. “When we look at how familiar they are in the life sciences ecosystem, it’s amazing. Almost every healthcare system runs on Microsoft products.”
Bringing Terra to Azure could lead to significant adoption of the software, he said. Microsoft has more than 168,000 partners in healthcare and life sciences, said Dr. / Greg Moore, a Microsoft Corporate Vice President who previously worked in Google’s cloud division on healthcare. According to the company, as of 2019, 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue came from partners.
Microsoft’s decision to contribute to Terra alongside the Broad Institute and Verily comes less than a year after it introduced a Cloud for Health Care bundle, including Azure and the Teams communications app. Healthcare represents an industry in which Microsoft can increase its sales and profits, RBC analysts wrote in a November report.
The rise of the coronavirus “has made us more aware than ever” how crucial it is for researchers from different organizations to work together, rather than relying on narrower data sets and computing resources kept on site, said Clare Bernard, a senior. director at the broad institute.
Philippakis would not specify whether the software could be made available on Amazon Web Services.
“All decisions about including future clouds will be made jointly between Broad, Verily and Microsoft,” he said.
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