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MICROSOFT, ECLIPSYS ANNOUNCE MULTIYEAR STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

Eclipsys Corp and Microsoft Corp announced a multiyear strategic alliance to advance Eclipsys' SunriseXA enterprise solutions based on the Microsoft platform and .NET technologies. The goal of the strategic alliance is to provide innovative healthcare enterprise solutions that integrate with a wide array of legacy applications, are easier to implement and maintain, and are more adaptable to current and future customer needs -- at a lower total cost of ownership.

As a cornerstone of this alliance, the two companies will collaborate on marketing, sales and software development efforts. Microsoft and Eclipsys share a common technology vision that centers around the development of software based on industry standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Web services. These standards enable healthcare enterprises to deploy the most open and flexible solutions possible for their mission-critical businesses.

Specifically, in addition to creating and executing go-to-market sales and marketing campaigns, the alliance will deliver enhanced value to Eclipsys' customers by embedding Microsoft's .NET Framework, smart client technology and Web services into SunriseXA, thus providing users with richer, connected and more productive experiences across desktop and mobile devices.

"With this strategic alliance, Eclipsys is well-positioned to meet the needs of healthcare customers now and in the future," said Paul L. Ruflin, president and CEO of Eclipsys. "The coordinated sales, marketing and development effort between Eclipsys and Microsoft is a very powerful combination. This alliance agreement heightens our business agility and increases our delivery capacity at a time of significant investment in the next generation of health system solutions."

"Eclipsys joins a growing number of companies across many industries that are finding the Microsoft platform and .NET to be the right choices to improve developer productivity and to deliver flexible applications faster," said Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate vice president of the Platform Strategy and Partner Group at Microsoft. "Microsoft .NET technologies allow healthcare organizations to achieve a lower total cost of ownership by easily integrating legacy applications with new technologies and enabling them to share information across organizations and platforms."

The Microsoft-Eclipsys alliance comes at an important time in the healthcare technology industry as momentum increases for the deployment of advanced clinical information technology that helps improve patient safety and reduces medical errors. Solutions for computerized physician order entry (CPOE), such as the SunriseXA advanced clinical solution, transform user workflow by automating communication among clinicians. This eliminates paper- based processes and aids clinical decision-making by providing immediate, secure access to medical content and patient records at the point of care or virtually anywhere. More important, because these solutions automate communication, they are shown to improve patient safety and care delivery. These efforts are supported by patient safety advocates such as The Leapfrog Group and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, which recommend CPOE and automation to reduce the thousands of medical errors estimated to occur annually. Combined with regulatory compliance requirements, these factors will be instrumental in shaping the future of healthcare delivery.

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