Today, on July 16, 2018, an announcement was made by General Electric and Microsoft Corp. about an extended partnership that would combine operational and information technology with the aim of removing obstacles faced by industrial companies in the advancement of digital transformation projects. GE Digital plans to standardize its Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure with this alliance and to integrate the Predix portfolio with Azure’s cloud capabilities, which includes Azure IoT and Azure Data and Analytics.
The two electronic giants will also collaborate to sell and market together to offer premier Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions to customers across vertical markets. On top of that, GE Digital also plans to leverage the Azure cloud platform to run Predix-based IT workloads and productivity tools to boost efficiency across the company.
Not only are GE Digital’s solutions already used by top industrial companies such as Exelon, BP, Schindler, and Maersk, including flagship applications Predix Asset Performance Management and Predix ServiceMax, but also a number of customer-created Predix-based applications to bolster the efficiency of their assets. Taking advantage of the power of Azure will cause a spurt in the adoption of the Predix portfolio.
The union between the two parties will also definitely help different GE businesses to use Microsoft’s advanced enterprise capacities. This will support the petabytes of data controlled by the Predix platform, like GE’s monitoring and diagnostics centers, internal manufacturing as well as services programs.
Since Microsoft Azure has more available regions all over the world than any other major cloud provider, and its cloud lives up to a huge set of international standards and provides customer solutions globally, the partnership also means the enhancement in security within the Predix platform. This meets the specialized requirements of many industries including aviation. Leveraging Azure was a very significant step taken by GE in globally expanding its cloud and helping the rapid deployment of IoT applications by customers of both companies.
