General Electric is making its Predix industrial software platform available on Microsoft’s cloud, the companies announced Monday.
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It’s a move that marks the first step in overseas strategic collaboration between the two companies, one that will allow customers around the world to capture intelligence from their industrial assets.
“Connecting industrial machines to the internet through the cloud is a huge step toward simplifying business processes and reimagining how work gets done”, said Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE in a press release issued by Microsoft.
A developer preview will be released toward the end of this year, and Predix on Azure will be commercially available by the second quarter of 2017. GE’s Predix platform is already helping industrial customers rapidly build, securely deploy and effectively operate industrial applications. “If you talk about the new world of industrial internet, you talk about things like no unplanned downtime”. Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off in Toronto yesterday with 15,000 partners attending from 144 countries. But the new Azure Stack has much better parity with Microsoft’s public cloud offering, leading to new partner opportunities.
Bringing Predix to Azure means customers will have access to capabilities such as natural language technology, artificial intelligence, advanced data visualization and enterprise application integration.
Predix is a cloud-based software-as-a-service platform created to enable industrial businesses to perform large-scale analytics on industrial machinery to manage asset performance and optimize operations. That bridge, along with the availability of Predix in AppSource, Microsoft’s new site for Software-as-a-Service applications, provides the Microsoft partner ecosystem with opportunities. “This is a game changer for this industry that will drive consolidation of platforms on the Internet of Things”, says Abhi Kunté, global head of technology strategic alliances at GE Digital, in a statement.
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The combination of Microsoft’s Azure with GE’s Predix will only continue to grow as the two company look to integrate further the two solutions throughout their portfolios that enable customers to use the solutions alongside Azure IoT Suite, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Office 365, and Power BI.
