GE and Microsoft extend partnership to accelerate industrial IoT adoption

GE and Microsoft Corp. have announced an expanded partnership, bringing together operational technology and information technology to eliminate hurdles industrial companies face in advancing digital transformation projects.

As part of the union, GE Digital plans to standardise its Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure and will deeply integrate the Predix portfolio with Azure’s native cloud capabilities, including Azure IoT and Azure Data and Analytics.

The parties will also co-sell and go to market together, offering end customers premier Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions across verticals.

In addition, GE will leverage Microsoft Azure across its business for additional IT workloads and productivity tools, including internal Predix-based deployments, to drive innovation across the company.

GE Digital’s Predix application development platform is said to equip industrial organisations with everything they need to build, deploy and run IIoT applications.

Tapping into the power of Azure will help accelerate adoption of the Predix portfolio. The partnership brings together GE Digital’s expertise in industrial data and applications with Microsoft’s enterprise cloud.

GE also plans to leverage Azure across the company for a wide range of IT workloads and productivity tools, accelerating digital innovation and driving efficiencies.

This partnership also enables the different GE businesses to tap into Microsoft’s advanced enterprise capabilities, which will support the petabytes of data managed by the Predix platform, such as GE’s monitoring and diagnostics centres, internal manufacturing and services programs.

Microsoft Azure has announced 54 regions across the globe, with 42 currently available – more than any other major cloud provider. Its cloud meets a broad set of international standards and compliance requirements to ensure customer solutions can scale globally.

This partnership also enhances the security layer within the Predix platform, which meets the specialised requirements of industries such as aviation, power and utilities. Leveraging Azure enables GE to expand its cloud footprint globally.