Microsoft Corporation, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, is looking to help support the cannabis industry by assisting states in keeping track of plant sales.
The tech giant teamed up with another software company called Kind Financial to develop software that will help facilitate the tracking of the products, which will play a crucial role in the supply-side of the business — from the start of the process (the seed) to the final step (the sale).
Microsoft is the first big name company to offer such services. The company is striving to provide support to states that have legalized medical or recreational use of the green substance by monitoring the commerce side of the industry and verifying sales do not enter the sphere of dubious legality.
Most big name companies have shied away from the industry. Now, because of gradual societal acceptance and piecemeal, albeit substantial, state policy changes, businesses are seeing an open opportunity to include themselves in the booming marijuana market.
Tobacco companies have been waiting to pounce on the weed industry for years. “Since at least the 1970s, tobacco companies have been interested in marijuana and marijuana legalization as both a potential and a rival product,” according to an investigation written in the Milbank Quarterly. The biggest purveyor of plant products understand that the “legalizing marijuana opens the market to major corporations … to transform the marijuana market.”
Microsoft is getting into the pot sales game before its too late. The legalization movement has no signs of slowing down, as 25 states and Washington D.C. have legalized cannabis in some form, and more and more polls show a reckoning of welcoming.
“We do think there will be significant growth. As the industry is regulated, there will be more transactions, and we believe there will be more sophisticated requirements and tools down the road,” Kimberly Nelson, Microsoft’s executive director of state and local government solutions, predicts. Microsoft wants to add to the sophistication by bringing a well-known name to the taboo industry of pot peddling.
“Nobody has really come out of the closet, if you will,” said the founder of Green Wave Advisors, Matthew A. Karnes. His business supplies other companies with analyzed data on everything marijuana. “It’s very telling that a company of this caliber is taking the risk of coming out and engaging with a company that is focused on the cannabis business.”
Microsoft doesn’t want to fully embrace the pot industry quite yet. The tech conglomerate will be working with the startup Kind’s “government solutions” team to offer software to state and local governments that are striving to comply with the law. Microsoft will keep itself at arms-length to avoid any involvement with the direct sales or actual plants.
While Kind has no state contracts as of yet, “it has already applied, with Microsoft, to provide its software to Puerto Rico, which legalized marijuana for medical purposes earlier this year,” according to the New York Times. More opportunities for contracts can potentially arise, as more and more voters will be faced with the prospect of legalizing marijuana, whether medically or recreationally, this fall at the voting booth.
Through his own analysis, Karnes expects that marijuana “could climb to $25 billion by the year 2020” and Microsoft is situating itself nicely before all of the seats in the marijuana market are taken.
Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), the country’s largest cannabis advocacy organization, is excited about the prospect since it exemplifies a larger shift in America. “So that speaks to how much has changed and how today what’s heralded in a newswire as a big partnership, years ago would have put you in federal prison.”
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