Microsoft Completes Nuance Acquisition

Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Nuance Communications less than a year after the deal was announced.

It was a significant transaction, valued at $16 billion, or $19 billion inclusive of Nuance’s debt. When the arrangement was announced last April, Microsoft placed a strong emphasis on Nuance’s activities in the healthcare sector, where its AI-driven automation technology can be used to enable voice-based clinical documentation, helping to save time for physicians and other healthcare professionals.

But Nuance’s biometric security technologies also offer synergies. Microsoft has been a pioneer of consumer-facing biometric authentication with its Windows Hello login system, which enables Windows 10 users to access their devices using fingerprint or facial recognition. Nuance, meanwhile, offers biometric security based on voice recognition, and these solutions have proven to be important revenue drivers for the company thanks to strong interest from the enterprise sector.

Now, with the acquisition’s completion, Nuance has been integrated into Microsoft’s business and government-focused business arm, with Nuance CEO Mark Benjamin reporting to Microsoft Cloud and AI Group EVP Scott Guthrie.

“Completion of this significant and strategic acquisition brings together Nuance’s best-in-class conversational AI and ambient intelligence with Microsoft’s secure and trusted industry cloud offerings,” Guthrie said. “This powerful combination will help providers offer more affordable, effective and accessible healthcare, and help organizations in every industry create more personalized and meaningful customer experiences.”

For his part, Benjamin suggested that the business combination will enable the Nuance team “to accelerate our innovation and deploy our solutions more quickly, more seamlessly and at greater scale to solve our customers’ most pressing challenges.”

While the organizations had originally hoped to complete the merger in 2021, its finalization now arrives after a strong start to 2022 for Nuance, which was named the market leader in fraud prevention in Opus Research’s Intelligent Authentication and Fraud Prevention Report.

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Mar. 7, 2022 – by Alex Perala