MR. GATES: Well, good morning. It's great to see you all here. There are certainly a lot of exciting things happening with the use of technology in healthcare. It's something that Microsoft is very committed to, and the users' group is the best evidence we have of that. This is something that we're very proud of and pleased to see the success and the growth pulling this event together.

These are very exciting times. Technology is not standing still. It's not just the incredible improvements in the chip anymore, but it's also the way that we're connecting all these machines together, using the Internet as a backbone, but creating standards that allows us to get new forms of communication, and new ways of having software working with each other that were never possible before.

So, this is a period where the rate of change will actually be more rapid than it has been in the last ten years. And our commitment is to work with all of you to see how healthcare can benefit from that. That's why I titled my comments today, Building Bridges in Healthcare.

You know, Microsoft's vision of using technology goes back now 25 years. We're having a company meeting this week, on Thursday, and we'll be celebrating our 25th year of being in business. It's a long time. How many of you have had the same job for 25 years? Well, I have, although it's a job that's expanded in responsibilities and complexity as time has gone on.

The original thought that technology could really empower people and would be pervasive and that software would be a key element of that is what got Paul Allen and I excited about starting a new company and dropping out of school back in 1975.

Well, the vision of how things would improve really has come true even more than we would have expected. You just look ten years ago and say, what was the world's most powerful computer, what could it do? This is a Cray machine that was $14 million. They were kind of unwieldy, they're 5,000 pound, water-cooled devices, and they sold about a dozen of these.

Well, today something with substantially more power is available just as a Windows workstation, and it weighs quite a bit less, less than 50 pounds. So the progress in really getting this power out, whether it's for analyzing data, looking at images, doing medical research, the power is really there. There's no shortage of computing power. In fact, sometimes when we go and see our friends at Intel they ask us, geez, what are people going to do as we make more and more powerful chips, what kind of things will they be using them for?

Well, we have no problems seeing things like speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and deep analysis where you model the user and what they're doing will allow us to benefit form this increased power, even going beyond that supercomputer level of capability.

We did see that the original vision can actually be expanded. In no way does anything about the original vision need to change, but in some ways that vision which was breathtaking when we first put it forward is now taken for granted. You know, in 1975, I said "a computer in every home," people thought that was funny. Well, now, people say, "well, sure." You know, over 50 percent of American households today have a PC. In the next year, that will grow to over 60 percent. And if you limit it to households with kids, it's already over 75 percent.

So it's very important when we have a vision that we look to the future. So we've taken our vision, and we talk about how all the information you care about is going to be available to you in sort of a magical way. You won't have to think about moving it from your PC to your hand-held, and from one PC to another, it will just sort of be in there in the clouds, your contact lists, your mail, your voice mail, your files, your ability to share that, and it will be presented to you in a way that's appropriate for the size of the screen you're looking at.

If you take the extreme, where you're just using a phone, you have no screen at all, and you're simply talking to the device, you'll be able to navigate through your information that way as well. All the way up to, say, a large flat panel display that might cover your entire wall or desktop and give you visualization of an incredible amount of information.

And so the idea of empowerment, the idea of using these magical microprocessors and great software, all of that stays the same, but the breadth of what we're talking about in terms of devices, and ease of getting at the information, and having this as the ultimate communication tool, that even supercedes the phone system we have today, that's a substantial expansion of that original vision.

Now, if we think about this and all the opportunities it opens up, of course there are a lot of challenges applying this in any particular field. I think healthcare in particular has the challenge of having so many diverse organizations, so much change taking place all the time, so that the complexity levels are high, the need for reliability and accuracy are probably higher in your area than in any other. The existing systems that are out there, even some mainframes, minicomputer systems that you've got to interoperate with are a tough problem. The regulations can change the rules of the game on a pretty regular basis. And, so I would say that even the current technology, in some ways, is underutilized. And we see it as part of our role, and certainly the whole existence of this user group's activity, is to help take the leading examples of organizations that are doing great utilization of the technology and spread the word about that, because there are some pioneers in the field who are doing some really wonderful things.

As we look forward, we can be even more ambitious. For example, wireless networks. Wireless networks are getting to be very inexpensive, and in a hospital environment, where going in and running new wiring is difficult, and where you want to be able to walk around with a tablet or a small screen device, the wireless network, I think, is going to make a huge difference.

Paperless offices. Today in medical care, we're trying to get rid of all the paper forms. But an even more extreme view is to get rid of even the paper that you use to read information and get up-to-date, and be able to have a screen that is so high resolution that it's more comfortable actually reading off of that than it would have been off of paper.

The need for simple security solutions -- we'll be showing some advances there using the smart card -- is very important. The need for a variety of these devices to all work together, the need to use this new communication infrastructure to have better feedback, better feedback from customers and between partners, all of these elements really are coming together now, along with some of the services we offer. We think to create a huge opportunity for those who want to step out and use these new things.

Well, paperless is a vision that's been talked about for the office broadly for over a decade and, in fact, use of paper in offices is up by a factor of three during those ten years. So, whoever said it was going to go down sort of got the direction wrong. Despite that, though, we feel that that will be reversed, and it requires in some cases having standards. Inside Microsoft, I simply decreed that we wouldn't have any paper forms. And once people got that in their head and thought, okay, that means we're building Web applications that replace those paper forms, they were able to do something that was far better. So, getting rid of forms is pretty basic. It's got to be the first step, but it's only a first step.

Once we have the display of the information on these screens far better, you'll be able to carry a tablet like device around that you take annotations on, including a new generation of handwriting recognition, that will make this sort of a practical portable PC, like the portable PC without a keyboard, but connected up through the wireless network.

And the user interface will be simplified, and that's one of the things Microsoft is putting a lot of its research into, how do you avoid having so many commands, and having to think about so many different applications. You can see here there's a little screen where things like discussions and links and images will all be brought together in these rich documents, and it will be easy to navigate the information inside the hospital, and everything out on the Internet as well. So, this is what a future PC will look like, upwards compatible, it will run today's applications, but run better applications as well.

I mentioned security, and there are many security approaches -- fingerprint scanning. Today the standard is the password, but the password really has some very severe limitations. First of all, it takes time to enter in your password, and so if you're doing your rounds, want to go and just call up some quick information, it's sort of a block. You want something that's very, very quick. Also, passwords, people tend to forget them, they try to use the same password on different systems, even on insecure systems. They don't want to change them, they want to make them easy to remember. And so, they tend to be the weakest element in the security picture. All the effort that goes into encryption protocols, and transports and things like that are sort of a waste of time if you've go this weak element which is that resetting the password is something to get easy access to.

And so we think that smart cards will be the most likely solution to this. As I said, it's not the only approach, but it's the one that seems to be catching on, and our architecture is very flexible here. You know, I think that medical personnel who are asking to see private information will be swiping a smart card as a first step. As a second step, even customers if they come to check in, or want to look up records, or they want to engage in a private dialogue, they'll be using the smart card as well. This one technology that has not caught on as quickly in the U.S. as outside the United States. That's fairly rare, but Europe is ahead of us in the use of smart cards, doing some really great things not only in the banking area but also in healthcare. There, they have the government in some cases actually issuing these smart cards to everyone, and so the infrastructure piece is simply there for everyone to take advantage of.

I am saying that in this environment the PC will still be the primary device. When you create documents, you want to see full screen documents, you want to see business information, you can't use a small screen. You want the full power of the PC where you're editing and annotating those things.

But if you're simply reading the information, you'd like to be able to get at it from all the different devices, and it's really gratifying to see the support from our partners of our Windows CE operating system that runs on the smaller devices. We have a growing number of those devices, and the price is coming down. Last year, the first color Windows CE devices came out, and that's really boosted the demand quite incredibly, it's about five times what it was when we just had black and white devices. And now we're seeing people taking the form factor and reducing it a great deal, making it very, very thin, increasing the battery life, and even applications like stored digital audio or music are able to run on these.

We do a thing with our employees where we have a Web site they can go to and look at recent speeches or talks that were given, they can download into their little Windows CE portable the things that they're interested in, and then just as they're driving into work, they can listen to the portions that are relevant to them. We used to do that by pressing a special CD that they could use, but then it wasn't customized to the individual, and we had about a 40-day lead time to get that done, now they just do it in a very customized way with their own little Windows CE device, which is one little glimpse of how information is becoming so easy to get to.

Another place we're connecting up to is the TV set, our WebTV technology is now in over 800,000 homes in the United States, and that's a way of just browsing in to that same rich information. The breakthrough idea here is that you won't have to think about moving it around. That we will automatically do that for you. One of the ways that I think this needs to get used is to make improvements quicker than they ever been before.

For example, on our Web site, we take about one out of 20 customers and ask them to give us feedback. Was the Web site frustrating, did they find what they wanted, what did they like best? And so, we know on a daily basis if there's something that's frustrating people. That same thing applies internally. If I have a question about a group and their morale, their understanding of the vision, or the time frames that we're hoping things will get done in, I can simply send out either an anonymous survey or an attributed survey, just sit down and it takes me 10 minutes to do it. And so, knowing what are people thinking, how do they feel about things, although people have talked about that as important for many, many years, the actual execution was actually often the thing that held people back from really doing it.

Here, it is so simple that you can have far, far better feedback loops, you know, whether it's patient care quality, whether it's cost analysis, all these things, when they're in a digital form, can be far better.

I talk about spreading around best practices, getting the ideas of the best work spread throughout the field. Part of the way that we help with this is that we've taken part of our consulting organization, which is over 1,000 people, and specialized a group there around healthcare. These are people with a broad background in healthcare, and they've taken on some really leading-edge projects.

Because we are not a consulting company in the sense of that's a business for us, our goal is to spread the best thinking, and then move on to other projects. So the center of what we do is simply making sure that with our building block software, people get the greatest benefits that they can out of it. So, it makes us quite different than anybody else who helps out with consulting activities.

Some of these projects here are, of course, chronicled up on our Web site. The Web site has become our primary communication vehicle with our customer base, and the traffic we get there is pretty amazing. It's actually many times greater than the most popular periodical in the technology field. And so we are creating more impressions, more understanding directly through that Web site than we could ever hope to create indirectly. They're both important, but the Web site is now a huge, huge investment for us. And case studies are a big part of that. In fact, more and more with those case studies, we're putting up sample code that people can simply take, and in a few days have the template, be up building a rich Web site or Web application for whatever they're trying to do.

Now, we have some big milestones coming up. The biggest one for us for a long, long time is this new version of Windows. The most investment that's ever gone into a version of Windows. It's a huge milestone in terms of not only the richness, the Active Directory, the policy management, things aimed at really changing the framework of cost of ownership, allowing a central administrator to completely control the policies, the software deployment, avoid ever having to visit a PC desktop, but also just the basic scalability and reliability of the system we've made some dramatic advances. You know, whereas in the past people have talked about during the period of a month rebooting systems, or having systems down, now we have huge server farms that for months at a time run absolutely with no problems. And then, through the clustering technology that's supported here, even if there is a problem with one system, the users don't notice it because automatically for the transacted applications, the other members of the cluster take that over.

So, Windows 2000 is a very big thing for us. We're really getting towards seeing the end of the project just being very near. We're getting great feedback. We really appreciate those people who are working with the beta and helping make sure that this is an incredibly high quality product. We do expect to have it out before the end of the year to release it to manufacturing. We'll see, the key thing that's going to drive that is absolutely the quality.

Now, if you look at this, the support we're getting for Windows, Windows NT as a server solution, and our other BackOffice products built onto it, if I presented at a healthcare event four or five years ago these lists would have just a few names on it. And so, the progress there's been pretty amazing in terms of application support. You know, Windows as the server operating system has gotten extremely high share in this area, and that's built up momentum with more support from the vendors. And they help us by giving us feedback of what we should do, put into the product to make it better. A special category here is of course Windows CE, that I mentioned, where you can get onto the small screen devices as well.

One of the ways to appreciate why we're so enthusiastic about it is to see one of these things in action. And, so I've got two demonstrations I want to show this morning. The first is one that is really very cool around patient records. It's using Medisure, Odyssey software. So, I would like to ask Chuck Reeves, a technical specialist in our healthcare group, to come up and show us what that looks like.

Welcome, Chuck.

MR. REEVES: Thank you.

Bill, one of the interesting challenges that we have in the healthcare industry today is how to provide effective views of information to healthcare works at the point of care, and at the same time empower the patients that are generating this information to maintain some control over who has the ability to view and manipulate that data. Medisure has kind of taken a very interesting approach to this problem by taking advantage of a number of our technologies, such as smart cards, BizTalk, and a number of other features.

The application is actually designed to maintain patient medical record information for pregnant mothers over the course of their pregnancy, and it is a Web-based app that basically draws all of the information off of the smart card itself. You actually don't store any of the data up on the Web.

So, a typical clinical user would simply log into the app. This identifies the profile which enables them to basically gain access to different features on the card itself. And it will be validated via the Web-based portal.

So, as the pregnant mother arrives at the clinic, we'll actually take her smart card, which we have placed in the smart card reader at this point, and check her in, and we'll actually read the data off of the card and into the system. This information has actually been accumulated over the course of her pregnancy, and can be updated regardless of what clinic that she's actually working at, leveraging a number of widely available technologies again, such as smart card readers, which are becoming more commonly available on PCs, and the Windows smart card operating system which allows us to access that information in a standardized and simple way.

So, at this point, we've actually retrieved all the information off the smart card, and we might want to still perform an eligibility verification. We're actually going to out live over the Web to Healtheon, through a BizTalk messaging schema that we've actually set up to interact with their system to verify that her insurance is still in force. So, we'll go to the eligibility verification page, where we find that her demographics that are available off of the card are filled in, which we can then verify with her at that time. And as we check eligibility, we're actually going out live over the Web in this demonstration to Healtheon's live system to actually retrieve that data.

MR. GATES: We did it.

MR. REEVES: Yes.

(Applause.)

MR. REEVES: So, obviously verifying that she has insurance that's in force up to and beyond this date is important in realizing what her obligations are for payment, and that sort of thing is important. Once that is actually done, we have a Windows CE application that we've actually developed, and this is a wireless app built on a tablet device, and it was actually written by a company by the name of Odyssey Software. And what it allows us to do is to put an application in the hands of the healthcare worker in a more natural and intuitive way, so that they'll be able to use this in a more effective and timely fashion.

So, what this app actually is designed to do is to collect vital statistic information, such as blood pressure, heart rate, that sort of thing. As we update this data, we can actually go to a view of today's visit and see the information that we've collected, and you'll see that the weight and the blood pressure are actually filled in on this form.

This is kind of an interesting feature on this form, some of the things that they've done. Based on the security aspects that they set up on the Web site, they've actually enabled some role-based security, so that I locked in as a doctor, have the ability to fill out things like my soap notes, observations, and treatment plans, and things like that. Yet, I can only have view privileges to the nurse's portion of the form, yet I can see them, which enables me to make some very good decisions.

They have a maternity summary, this is basically a snapshot of the information that a physician might take just prior to actually visiting with the pregnant mother that involves some past pregnancy information, any active problems that they're tracking, and perhaps some current medications. We also have some more detailed information about the medications themselves, and a detailed list of any pending and completed labs that are underway for her.

I think one of the compelling pieces of this is that the hardware and software that you need are going to be widely available in many different facilities, and the deployment requirements for this application are not significant, since the app is running on the Web and the information is on the card. And, as such, it will be available in an acute environment such as when she has to do an immediate delivery, or something like that.

So, following this visit, we'd be able to write the information back to the card upon her discharge, and she would take that home with her, where she actually had control of her patient medical record information, and yet provided it to the healthcare workers that support her.

MR. GATES: That's great. Thanks, Chuck.

MR. REEVES: Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: One of the things that people have been asking us to do is to take all of the work we do around healthcare applications and come up with an explicit architecture that shows how those pieces fit together. And so, with that in mind, we've been doing a lot of work with many of the people here over the last six months, and pulling together what we call the Windows DNA architecture for healthcare. And Windows DNA, of course, is the name we use for our broad architecture, things like BizTalk, which is the Web standard for how businesses describe customers and transactions to each other, all those broad standards are applied here, and then extended because of the very special requirements that there are in the healthcare environment.

So this is our technical architecture. There's a lot of white papers around this. Again, the Web site is a very key way to understand what we've got here. But today is the official rollout of this architecture. What does it have? Well, it's full of technical strategy. It's got the cases I talked about, it's got presentations, developer kits, there are many elements that go into it. But, overall, it says that these medical applications will use the Internet. They will be still taking advantage of the PC, they'll be using XML-type records. We've been able to take all the work we did around OLE and ActiveX controls, and map those in an automatic way into XML format. And so all the standardization work of that patient record and things that have gone on, all of that work immediately applies in this XML environment. In fact, there's total interoperability in the different ways of presenting the information.

So, we describe how in this Internet-based world these transactions will work, how notifications will work across the Internet, and how all the different applications can collaborate together. There's a lot of technical depth to this, part of it is what you'd call a schema to describe the standard objects and all their properties, and that's a very key and in-depth description.

The kind of things that we're focused on here are allowing all the commerce things to be done without paper, allowing these systems to work with legacy systems. Part of the beauty of these standards is that once you get things in these record formats, XML record formats, you can actually work with legacy systems in a better way than when things were so tightly coupled. This is a loosely coupled environment that simplifies that quite a bit.

And we have working groups inside the healthcare user group to make sure that we're picking the right scenarios to focus on what the architecture solves, and making sure that we're getting your feedback on how we drive these forward. So, Microsoft Healthcare Users Group is actually the living part of this architecture, making sure that we get that right.

I want to show some of these architectural elements and how they come together in a very powerful way. And so what I've got is some Sequoia software contribution, an XML portal, and a concept that we talk about as Digital Dashboard, that is how can an individual get all the information they care about in one place. And in order to show this, I would like to ask Chad Richards, another technical specialist in our healthcare group, to come on out and give us a look.

Hi, Chad.

(Applause.)

MR. RICHARDS: Good morning.

What I would like to show this morning is very much the same perspective as Chuck showed a little earlier. What we're trying to do is be able to provide effective view of information to the point of care.

So, our first example is Sequoia software, and what we're showing here is actually an XML portal. So, let's dive in, and what I'm going to do right now is basically a patient search. It's going to go out and do a master patient index query and find the patient that I requested. So, we see we have a hit here. We're going to dive into the healthcare summary.

Now, what's going on right here is the portal is aggregating all of the information that it knows about this particular patient. It's been dynamically constructing this view, and as you can see as I kind of scroll down through here, the links are actually dynamically placed based on the content of the information, and the particular view. So, if I jump out, you can see that I have a document from Baylor University Medical Center, which is one place that this solution is deployed, and they've been able to store their documents in this repository.

So, if I go back up, you can see the different categories that we're able to structure from this information. So, for example, if this patient has been recently admitted for an MI, and if you see the links, as I mentioned were dynamically placed, so we can hyperlink out to the Web to be able to access additional information.

So, let's also show this information is coming from a particular set of information that's already flowing through your healthcare system. So, basically what this is is a claims form. And, again, the document has been indexed based on the XML tags, and then that XML is provided back to the client where we can apply style sheets. So that gives us the ability to adjust the presentation of this information.

Let's show some of the additional features of this software. You'll notice the notification, what we can do here is basically request that if changes are applied to the medical summary, in this case medication, then we can request that we're notified via email. So, let's actually go back and see how this would work.

If I do a prescription, I can actually drop down and select the prescription that I wrote. This brings up the medical formulary, and then I can just enter a physician's name here. What's going on at this point is, we're doing an MCPDP message from the Sequoia portal via BizTalk back to a pharmacy system. The pharmacy system is then accepting that request, and processing it and sending us back a message saying that they've filled that delivery.

So, as you can see, I'll scroll down here, and we'll do a refresh, and this is, indeed, live, so, again, this is going back out and restructuring all this information and reaggregating, so you can see the entry that I just made shows up here.

So that's some of the functionality that's available, but this allowed us to dive into a single patient's medical summary.

MR. GATES: Right.

MR. RICHARDS: So, at this point, it's interesting to be able to draw it back, and instead of taking a very vertical view of the information, to get a horizontal cross-section and be able to do nested queries across all of the information that's been aggregated by the portal.

So, for example, we can do a query where we're going to search for a patient that's had an MI and a procedure of a triple bypass, and then had been readmitted within the last 90 days. So, as it goes out, typically the way these types of queries were done is there were data warehouses, and the construction of those is very complex, but in this particular product, that's not the case. This is all dynamic, just based on the query of the XML things that have been indexed. So, we can drill into do the Zimmer summary, and again what's happening is, it's aggregating that information so we get the view. And we can see that it satisfies the query that we made, we have an MI and in this case it's within the past 60 days, and then they've been readmitted. So that satisfies the request.

So, actually what we can do from here, again, from that point, we're back vertically into that patient's medical history. So, as a physician I can say, okay, what I would like to do is refer this person to a specialist. So, we send off, it automatically pops up the email, the email was automatically calculated with the health summary from this particular patient, and then emailed directly to the specialist.

So, if we step over here, we can actually see a Digital Dashboard, and what this is a concept where we can provide, again, a contiguous view of clinical information, and this is built based on some componentry that's currently being developed within the knowledge management team at Microsoft. So, as you can see, we've got two emails. One of those was the notification I requested based on the medication modification, and then the other was the referral. So, if we were to drill into that, that's what would be there.

But, as I look at my calendar today, from a specialist perspective, I can see that I have an appointment at noon, and my outpatient schedule is pretty clear this morning. So, what I want to do is actually take a look at my inpatient, and determine if I need to go visit any of them this morning while I have some time. And as I can see the referral has been taken from the Sequoia system, and we're able to go out and actually extract that information again from their portal, and provide another consolidated view at the clinician's desktop.

So, actually, I can see that this patient is a follow-up, and that I was waiting on an ECG. So, why don't we go out and see if this ECG is available. And, in fact, it is. And, again, what's happening here is that we're going to the portal, the portal is storing this XML document, and then presenting it back to us when we request it.

Some other nice things about a Dashboard concept is it allows us to present a vast amount of information that's basically just a click away. So that's a nice feature to be able to run your business. And actually, what we've done here on the bottom is to say, what we would like to do is be able to take a snapshot of the patient mix, and be able to provide some pivot charts, and things like that, where we can allow the physician himself to keep tabs on his business.

MR. GATES: Part of the idea here is that somebody can set this up according to their individual interests, so mixing in what kinds of data actually drives their daily activities.

MR. RICHARDS: Absolutely. The framework is based on Outlook and Exchange, and they're very personalizable based on user preference. And, in fact, the tool kit that's being developed allows you to go in and custom modify either from a user's perspective, or even an administrative perspective, to adjust what the Dashboard looks like for a particular set of users.

MR. GATES: Well, that's great. Thanks very much.

MR. RICHARDS: Thank you.

(Applause.)

MR. GATES: The Digital Dashboard is something we're very excited about. It's taking your mail, your schedule, your appointment lists, all the things that you care about, along with the information out on the Web, and letting you create a custom view. In fact, you know, it's really reversing the way people have been thinking about the Internet. People have been thinking about the Internet almost like TV channels, where you go to a well-known URL and everybody sees a fairly similar thing. Here we're saying that instead of that, the user gets the entire Web to pull things that they care about, not just the broad Web, but their internal systems. And so, you could have stock quotes, weather, information, your voice mail notification, along with all that patient data and analysis brought together exactly the way that you want it. And that's the framework that Microsoft Outlook as part of office provides.

Now, Microsoft has been increasing its R&D spending very dramatically over the last five years. We're up to $3.8 billion a year in R&D. And that's because we think that in this new world, the importance of great software will be even greater than ever before. Now, part of it is to evolve the Windows platform. Most of the applications you've seen here today are running as web-based applications. And so, even if there is software running locally, the user didn't have to think about it. It came down onto that machine without any of the normal overhead.

So, this is the kind of application we're working to make it easy to build. We call it the Windows Web-centric platform. There's a lot of pieces of this that get better and better as we roll out Windows 2000.

One of the elements is infinite scalability, the ability to cluster machines together so that all the work can be spread across them. And if you ever want faster response times, you just add in a new machine. We call that scaling out, because it's the only true solution to the kind of demand people see across the Web. So, scalability, reliability, and easy development are part of this platform. And of our R&D really a majority is going into that.

A complementary element is to take user interface and revolutionize that as well. The mouse and graphics are great, but we also want the voice recognition, the handwriting recognition, even visual recognition to know, is there a user at the machine, and how are they responding to what's going on. All of that will be pretty standard in the PC. In fact, those cameras connected up over a USB connection are now less than $50. They'll be used primarily for video conferencing, but then also by the computer to create a more natural interface.

So, the PC is going to look very different than it does today. It will be that tablet, it will be the phone that you talk to, it will be your information stored out there on the Web and easy to access. It's a much broader view of what this platform looks like.

The next 12 months will be a very important set of milestones, not only Windows 2000 itself, but a new collaboration platform with our Exchange software, the evolution of the programming methods that make it easy to build these applications, what we call COM+, and then the actual standards under the term BizTalk of what the information looks like in this new Internet standard called XML.

So, it's those pieces coming together that makes me say we've got a revolutionary opportunity. And the way that this will change relationships, the patient feeling more empowered to get information, to have simple dialogues with doctors, the way that doctors interface and find out the latest advances or work with pharmaceutical companies, all of these things are being changed by the this technology. And we're very excited to be part of this. We know what we're good at, which is building software building blocks. We're going to stick to that and just keep doing that well. That means that we need lots of partnerships and a constant dialogue. But we do have this passion towards building the best software platform, using partnerships and really being willing to bet on the fact that we can just make this better and better.

And so, we look forward to working with you on this, and it's a very exciting time.

Thank you.

(Applause.)