This was originally published at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Microsoft last week registered a limited liability company (LLC) in Delaware, stoking speculation that it is planning an acquisition or joint venture. If true, Microsoft may be planning a little bit more than a demo of its search engine and a big ad campaign to promote it.
In a research report, Jeffries analyst Katherine Egbert wrote:
The software giant registered an LLC Corp. in Delaware last week, a move often made a week or two in advance of acquisitions or joint ventures. The registration gave rise to widespread speculation that Microsoft would acquire Citrix. While that's possible, the timing of the registration and recent debt raise indicate to us that it might be more likely Microsoft uses the LLC to form a partnership to boost the amount of traffic flowing through its search engine. It makes sense to us that Microsoft would want to address both the passive and active search markets simultaneously.
For what it's worth, an acquisition of Citrix would make much more business sense, but Microsoft's LLC move is likely to lead to a deal with Yahoo.
Regarding Egbert's passive comment:
Passive searches are performed via search toolbars embedded on popular sites, such as Yahoo's homepage or MSN, while active searches come via a user typing the search provider's URL into a browser e.g. google.com.
Egbert adds that a search engine move--perhaps that long-awaited deal with Yaho--would make sense. After all, Microsoft is going to blow $80 million to $100 million on advertising its "Bing" search engine in an attempt to garner users. It wouldn't hurt to pump some traffic through Bing to get things rolling.
With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.
Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.
The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has worked.
President Obama's stimulus package provides on the order of $20 billion for health care technology, with the central focus being nudging hospitals and doctors to move their records from manila folders to computers. Even with the money, though, it's seen as a daunting task.
"The EHR Stimulus Alliance is a unified movement toward turning the national dialogue surrounding the EHR transition into action," Nuance Healthcare President John Shagoury said in a statement. "Each of the partners involved has unique solutions that are crucial to EHR implementation. In our case, because most doctors speak at least three times faster than they type, speech recognition technology helps increase the meaningful use and efficiency of EHRs by decreasing physician reliance on the keyboard and mouse."
The alliance hopes to reach half a million doctors with its message.
Although the alliance represents a number of the big names in tech, there are a lot of other players in the electronic health records business, including Cerner, General Electric, eClinicalWorks, McKesson, and NextGen, as well as start-ups such as Medsphere. Other tech players also pushing hard for their piece of the industry include IBM and storage giant EMC.
By the way, I and some colleagues will have a ton more to say on this topic next week as CNET News takes an in-depth look at the push toward electronic health records.
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