Microsoft is to acquire artificial intelligence and cloud computing company Nuance for $19.7 billion (roughly Rs. 1,47,900 crores), bolstering its healthcare presence with a leader in voice recognition technology.

Nuance’s technology includes a conversational AI tool versed in specialised medical terms, freeing physicians from note-taking, and allowing better patient-physician interactions in person or in the telemedicine appointments that have taken off during the pandemic, executives said.

Nuance’s programme “has completely redefined clinical documentation by capturing and contextualising every words of the physician/patient encounter and automatically documenting it,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella during a briefing Monday.

Nuance’s technology is used extensively in medical records and is currently employed in more than three-quarters of US hospitals, Microsoft said in a news release. The transaction is all-cash and the sum includes Nuance’s net debt.

Nuance’s technology is currently used by more than 55 percent of physicians and 75 percent of radiologists in the United States. Microsoft said the deal would double its potential healthcare market to nearly $500 billion (roughly Rs. 37,53,880 crores).

This acquisition builds on the existing partnership between the two companies, which have been collaborating since 2019 in telemedicine, a sector whose growth has been spurred exponentially by COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.

Last year, the Redmond, Washington-based giant integrated Nuance Communication’s Dragon Ambient eXperience programme into its Teams communications software, which enables remote transcription of medical conversations.”

Microsoft also sees potential to expand the technology beyond health care. For example, the similar AI transcriptions could be employed by financial advisors, said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft’s cloud and AI group.

“Nearly any professional service could benefit from real-time engagement converted into material intelligence that drives actions,” Guthrie said during an investor presentation.

“Every customer I talk to is looking to make the right decision at the right time for all of their stakeholders.”

‘No brainer’
The deal comes on the heels of Microsoft’s 2016 purchase of LinkedIn for $27 billion (roughly Rs. 2,02,620 crores) and represents “the latest step in Microsoft’s industry-specific cloud strategy,” the company said.

Like other technology heavyweights, Microsoft has been a big beneficiary of the economic dislocations during COVID-19.

The company’s earnings jumped by 33 percent in the latest quarter to $15.5 billion (roughly Rs. 1,16,320 crores) and included a boost from cloud computing and personal computing, including its Xbox video games.

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives called the Nuance tie-up a “trophy” deal for the company founded by Bill Gates, which is on a “strategic offensive” in search of targets to buy.

“For Nadella & Co, this is the right acquisition at the right time with Microsoft doubling down on its healthcare initiatives over the coming years,” he said in an analysis. “The Nuance deal is a strategic no brainer in our opinion for MSFT and fits like a glove into its healthcare endeavors.”

Based in Burlington, near Boston, Nuance was founded in 1992 and specialises in conversational artificial intelligence solutions, particularly in the healthcare sector.

Nuance Communications, which employed more than 7,100 people as of September 30, reported sales of $1.48 billion (roughly Rs. 11,110 crores) last year.

Ives said Microsoft is on the hunt for more acquisitions and this deal “could be the first step in an increased appetite for deals in 2021 with Discord (video game chat community) another potential trophy for Redmond.”

It comes just a few months after the takeover of ZeniMax, the parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks, for $7.5 billion (roughly Rs. 56,300 crores) in September.

Media reports cite the potential for other big deals, including crafting platform Pinterest in a possible $51 billion (roughly Rs. 3,82,840 crores) transaction, and the popular Discord discussion platform for about $10 billion (roughly Rs. 75,070 crores).

MINNEAPOLIS, Jan. 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Global software consultancy, Tarmac, which designs, builds and scales exceptional custom software for companies across multiple industries, today announced its acquisition of assets of European Cloud-based company Usetrace, furthering its commitment to create client efficiencies and enhanced product delivery throughout the software development life-cycle. Headquartered in Finland, Usetrace provides a browser-based, automated user interface testing tool for recording and scripting user flows, called traces, from the perspective of users. The asset acquisition expands Tarmac’s offering to customers, providing additional automation opportunities to further accelerate the software release process by injecting quality into the process rather than testing for it afterward. This enables products to reach the market faster, more frequently and with higher quality. Usetrace doesn’t require coding or constant updating, making continuous deployment an achievable reality.

Using Usetrace, Tarmac development teams can capture key user flows and test them with continuous integration mirroring the process used for unit, integration, and functional testing exactly. As Usetrace helps reduce time spent on testing, it also allows developer resources to be freed up for other tasks while end-users receive quicker access to the latest services and upgrades. Under this model, the iteration cycles are short, often minutes or hours, instead of days or weeks, and Tarmac is able to eliminate the traditional “over-the-wall” to QA concept entirely.

“The exciting integration of Usetrace and its software automation tools into our software development process allows our clients to even more rapidly accelerate time to market with their product launches, increase productivity, and enhance the quality of their products,” said Anthony Schmidt, CEO of Tarmac. “For anyone familiar with a typical QA process, it is often laborious and a frequent bottleneck in the software release cycle, and acquiring Usetrace assets helps create overall efficiency and improve the quality of that experience. Several of our clients have already seen two to five times speed improvements in the ability to ship software since we’ve incorporated Usetrace.”

“Having a great product alone is not enough. Tarmac’s acquisition of Usetrace assets accelerates our joint ability to boost our product development, marketing and online growth. In addition to helping clients to significantly speed up their development, we’ve helped them achieve annual savings of more than a quarter-million dollars. Imagine what we will be able to do futuristically for our clients in collaboration with Tarmac,” said Arto Vuori, Co-Founder of Usetrace, who will continue to serve as a consultant to Tarmac.

Tarmac 10 Approach

Tarmac continues to implement its proven and proprietary “Tarmac 10” best practice software development approach with all clients, while integrating the new Usetrace tool throughout the development process. The Tarmac 10 are ten strategic, outcome-driven, effective practices that build product quality, speed, collaboration, clarity, peer reviews, and regular communication into the process instead of checking for it later, and help mitigate risk throughout the development lifecycle, no matter the scale of the project.

Who We Serve

For nearly a decade, Tarmac and Usetrace have served small, mid-size and Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industries, including FinTech, HealthTech, EdTech, Retail, Logistics and more. Tarmac has proudly partnered with Allina, Flipgrid, GovDocs, IDWorks, Pentair, Pillar and Passare, Spackle and Trusted Herd to produce custom software and mobile applications.

“Our customers receive improvements quicker than before with fewer reported UI bugs. Thanks to the automation, we can focus on testing new features instead of checking old features over and over again. This enhances both testing speed and release quality,” Teemu Haikala, QA Lead, LeadDesk.

“In mere two days, we built a comprehensive UI test suite with Usetrace, giving ourselves high confidence to change our underlying implementation, without fear of regression,” Henri Kauppinen, Project Lead, Örum.

Tarmac

Founded in 2010, Tarmac is a global software development company headquartered in Minneapolis with global offices in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and North Macedonia. that designs, builds and scales award-winning custom web and mobile apps. We combine highly skilled engineers and proven development methods, including our “Tarmac 10” software development approach, to help our clients efficiently deliver higher quality software and exceptional results. We are technology agnostic and leverage a wide array of modern languages including Ruby, Java, Python and Go . We recognize that today’s companies need a software development partner that works efficiently and collaboratively and a partner that remains ahead of the technology curve and consistently brings fresh perspective. Our global team puts the customer experience at the center of everything we do.

The Acquisition at a Glance

Microsoft announced in August 2019 that it had acquired JClarity, a London-based Java performance company and a leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project, for an undisclosed sum. The stated goal was to improve the performance and experience of Java workloads running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

John Montgomery, Microsoft’s VP of Program Management for Developer Tools and Services, announced the deal in a blog post, framing it as a direct investment in the Java developer community:

“Microsoft Azure and JClarity engineers will be working together to make Azure a better platform for our Java customers and internal teams, improving the experience of the platform for Java developers and end-users. The team, formed by Java champions and data scientists with proven expertise in data-driven Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimizations, will help teams at Microsoft to leverage advancements in the Java platform.”

— John Montgomery, VP of Program Management, Microsoft Developer Tools and Services

Who Is JClarity?

JClarity was founded by Java champions — recognised community leaders with deep expertise in the Java ecosystem — and data scientists specialising in JVM performance analysis and optimisation. The company built commercial Java performance tooling and became one of the most active contributors to AdoptOpenJDK, an open community project that produces freely available, production-quality OpenJDK binaries for a wide range of platforms.

OpenJDK itself is the free and open-source reference implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition. AdoptOpenJDK filled a gap left by Oracle’s 2018 changes to its JDK licensing model by offering build pipelines and binary distributions for Linux, Windows, macOS, and other platforms — without licence restrictions for production use.

Microsoft’s Pre-existing Java Commitment

The JClarity acquisition was not Microsoft’s first move toward the Java ecosystem. Key milestones before the deal include:

• June 2018: Microsoft became a platinum-level sponsor of AdoptOpenJDK, funding the project’s build and test infrastructure through at least 2020.
• Visual Studio Code Java support: Microsoft worked with the AdoptOpenJDK project to build and ship a Java installer integrated with its popular lightweight code editor, Visual Studio Code.
• Azure HDInsight: Microsoft’s open-source analytics service on Azure runs on Java-based technologies, including Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark.
• Minecraft: The flagship Microsoft gaming title — acquired as part of the Mojang purchase in 2014 — is written in Java.
• Enterprise Java customers: At the time of the acquisition, major Azure customers including Adobe, Daimler, and Société Générale were running significant Java workloads on the platform.

What Changes for JClarity Customers?

JClarity CEO Martijn Verburg transitioned to a role as Java Principal Engineering Group Manager at Microsoft following the acquisition. He emphasised continuity for existing customers and ongoing community involvement:

“It’s always been JClarity’s core mission to support the Java ecosystem. We started with our world-class performance tooling and then later became a leader in the AdoptOpenJDK project. Microsoft leads the world in backing developers and their communities, and after speaking to their engineering and program leadership it was a no-brainer to enter formal discussions. With the passion and deep expertise of Microsoft’s people, we’ll be able to support the Java ecosystem better than ever before.”

— Martijn Verburg, former JClarity CEO, Java Principal Engineering Group Manager at Microsoft

Verburg confirmed that JClarity would continue contributing to Java community projects post-acquisition, and that the company’s support team would contact existing customers directly to address questions about ongoing product and support arrangements.

Why This Matters for Java on Azure

Bringing JVM performance engineers and Java champions in-house gives Microsoft a direct pathway to influence JVM tuning at the platform level — optimising how the JVM behaves on Azure’s underlying infrastructure rather than relying solely on upstream OpenJDK improvements. This matters for enterprise workloads where garbage collection pauses, JIT compilation behaviour, and memory footprint directly affect service-level objectives.

The acquisition also strengthens Microsoft’s upstream credibility. Contributions to AdoptOpenJDK and OpenJDK itself signal to the enterprise Java community that Azure is a first-class destination for Java workloads — important positioning as AWS and Google Cloud had already established strong Java ecosystems of their own.

The Broader Java Developer Landscape

According to a SlashData report cited at the time of the acquisition, approximately 7.6 million developers worldwide actively coded in Java, making it one of the largest developer communities globally. For a cloud platform competing for enterprise workload migrations, meaningful investment in that ecosystem carries clear strategic weight.

Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams

• JVM expertise embedded in Azure: Microsoft now has in-house Java champions focused on platform-level JVM optimisation, which should translate to improved tooling and guidance for Azure-hosted Java applications.
• AdoptOpenJDK continuity: JClarity’s contributions to the AdoptOpenJDK project were set to continue, maintaining the availability of free, production-ready OpenJDK builds for multiple platforms.
• Enterprise Java on Azure: Teams evaluating cloud providers for Java workloads — particularly those running Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, or big-data frameworks on the JVM — gained a clearer signal of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to the platform.
• Existing JClarity customers: Support and product continuity were explicitly addressed, with the JClarity support team committed to reaching out directly to customers.

“Our goal is to help organisations deliver software efficiently while minimising risks associated with the deployment process,” says Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees. “The acquisition of Rollout gives CloudBees customers the flexibility to decouple features from software versions.

The Rollout solution allows developers to continuously deliver changes, by enabling them to control both the roll out and roll back of features instantly on any platform, including mobile, regardless of deployment restrictions.

The company says that the benefit of continuous software delivery is clear for software developers and teams who want to separate code deployments from feature releases. Customer relationships are enhanced by safely testing features in production environments, gathering valuable feedback and releasing new and improved features continuously.

CloudBees Brings Feature Flag Management Into Its CI/CD Platform

CloudBees announced on June 11, 2019, that it had acquired Rollout, a feature management company whose platform gives developers and product teams fine-grained control over when specific features become visible to end users. The acquisition extended CloudBees’ continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) portfolio by addressing one of the last high-risk steps in software delivery: the moment a new feature is actually exposed to production traffic.

Why Feature Flags Matter in a CI/CD Pipeline

Continuous delivery solves the problem of getting code into production quickly, but it does not on its own control when users experience a new capability. Feature flags — sometimes called feature toggles — solve that gap. A flag is a conditional in the codebase that routes traffic to either the old or new code path based on rules defined at runtime, without requiring a redeployment.

This separation of code deployment from feature release has several practical advantages for engineering and product teams:

• Incremental rollouts: Expose a new feature to 1%, 10%, or 50% of users before a full release, limiting blast radius if something goes wrong.
• Instant rollback: Turn a feature off at the flag level without reverting a deployment or executing a hotfix release cycle.
• Production testing: Run A/B experiments or canary tests against real traffic to gather behavioral data before committing to a feature.
• Trunk-based development: Developers merge incomplete features behind a flag, keeping the main branch always releasable.
• Cross-platform control: Flags can govern feature exposure on web, backend services, and mobile clients from a single control plane.

Forrester Research noted in a January 2019 report (AD&D Pros: Stop Guessing And Start Experimenting, Christopher Condo and Bill Seguin) that “getting ideas in front of users faster — ‘continuous discovery’ — is the new normal,” and that feature flags give application development and delivery teams “complete control of when to expose a particular feature to users, allowing administrators to turn it on and off at the flip of a switch.”

What Rollout Brought to the Table

Rollout positioned itself as a developer-first feature management platform with an emphasis on security and ease of integration. Key capabilities included:

• SDK-based feature flag implementation compatible with multiple languages and mobile platforms.
• Targeting rules that let teams segment rollouts by user attributes, geography, account tier, or custom properties.
• Audit trails and governance controls suited to regulated or enterprise environments.
• Instant kill-switch rollback that operates independently of the deployment pipeline.

These capabilities complemented CloudBees’ existing Jenkins-based CI/CD tooling by closing the loop between pipeline automation and controlled feature exposure.

Strategic Rationale for CloudBees

Sacha Labourey, CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, framed the acquisition around risk reduction: “Our goal is to help organizations deliver great, feature-rich software efficiently while minimizing risks associated with the deployment process. The acquisition of Rollout gives CloudBees customers the flexibility to decouple features from software versions.”

Erez Rusovsky, CEO and co-founder of Rollout, joined CloudBees as product director for the Rollout offering. He described the combination as additive: “Feature flags and CI/CD combined help companies truly become continuous and increase the pace of innovation.”

From a market positioning perspective, the deal signaled that end-to-end software delivery management must extend beyond pipeline automation to include runtime feature control. Organizations practicing trunk-based development or pursuing high deployment frequencies need a governance layer that keeps releases safe after the pipeline finishes.

How Feature Flags Fit Into a Modern DevOps Workflow

A typical integration of feature flags into a CI/CD pipeline looks like this:

1. Development: The engineer wraps new functionality in a feature flag. The flag defaults to off, so the code ships without user impact.
2. CI: Automated tests run against both flag states (on and off) to prevent regressions in either code path.
3. CD / Deployment: The artifact is deployed to production with the flag still off. No user-visible change occurs.
4. Controlled release: The product or ops team enables the flag for an internal test group, then expands to a percentage of users, monitoring error rates and business metrics.
5. Full release or rollback: If metrics are healthy, the flag rolls out to 100% and is eventually removed from code. If something breaks, the flag is turned off instantly—no deployment required.

This workflow eliminates the “big-bang” release model, where all users receive an untested change simultaneously, in favor of a controlled drip that surfaces problems early with limited exposure.

Context: CloudBees’ Broader Platform at the Time

At the time of the acquisition, CloudBees described itself as the largest contributor to Jenkins and Jenkins X and a founding member of the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF). Its customer base included over 3,500 organizations and more than 50% of the Fortune 500, according to the company’s own figures. The Rollout acquisition was part of a broader strategy to build what CloudBees called a “software delivery management” (SDM) system that covers the full lifecycle from code commit to production feature exposure.

Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams

• Feature flags are a risk management tool as much as a developer productivity tool; they decouple the binary choice of “deploy or don’t deploy.”
• Integrating flag management into a CI/CD platform (rather than bolting it on afterward) enables consistent governance, audit logging, and policy enforcement across the delivery pipeline.
• The acquisition reflected growing industry recognition that deployment frequency alone is not sufficient—controlled feature exposure is the final mile of safe continuous delivery.
• Teams evaluating feature flag platforms should assess SDK coverage for their target platforms (web, mobile, backend), targeting granularity, rollback latency, and integration depth with their existing CI/CD tooling.