General Electric (GE) and Microsoft Corporation are partnering to make GE’s Predix platform available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud for the industrial Internet of Things (IoT).
The agreement is the first step in a broader collaboration between the two companies to allow customers to capture intelligence from their industrial assets using Microsoft’s enterprise cloud applications.
Predix is an operating system for building applications that connect to industrial assets, collect and analyze data, and deliver real-time insights of the industrial infrastructure and operations. GE says bringing the platform to Microsoft’s Azure will allow businesses to connect industrial machines from the edge to the cloud, while offering a greater choice for machine intelligence.
Bringing Predix to Azure will help businesses build, securely deploy and operate industrial applications in the cloud with additional capabilities, such as natural language technology, artificial intelligence, advanced data visualization and enterprise application integration, GE says. Azure not only allows for cloud connectivity at a high level but also allows for data sovereignty, hybrid capabilities, and advanced developer and data services.
The collaboration will integrate Predix with Azure IoT suite and Cortana Intelligence suite along with other Microsoft business applications, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Bi. The companies plan to preview the Predix on Azure toward the end of 2016 with the platform being available commercially at the end of the second quarter of 2017.
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