GE, Microsoft Partner On Industrial Internet Of Things

Together they announced a partnership which would see the Predix platform as a service (PaaS), concentrated around the IoT or Internet of Things platform, which is something that GE is actively building. The move marks the first step in a broad strategic collaboration between the two companies.

In addition to announcing the partnership, Immelt offered some words of wisdom for businesses now undergoing a digital transformation like the one GE faced, especially in the industrial sector. “Their new integrations with Microsoft Azure allow our mutual customers to use the capabilities in Microsoft Azure VM and Microsoft Azure SQL Database, with full visibility across multiple Azure services and applications”.

Predix and Azure will also be integrated with Microsoft’s Cortana A.I. functionalities, Office 365, and other business applications.

“Connecting industrial machines to the internet through the cloud is a huge step toward simplifying business processes and reimagining how work gets done”, said GE chief executive Jeff Immelt.

“With Microsoft Azure, we are working to bring customers the most agile cloud platform available”, said Venkat Gattamneni, director, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft has enlisted a major new partner in its quest to become a premier provider of cloud-based Internet of things (IoT) software and services. “We’re excited about the capabilities that Acronis is bringing to Azure to offer additional options for data migration and protection for our mutual customers using the hybrid cloud”. Customers running CPS and Windows Azure Pack will be able to use these systems alongside Azure Stack ones; they won’t need to try to upgrade CPS systems to Azure Stack – another piece of new guidance from Microsoft today.

The partnership is important for Microsoft as it competes with similar services from Amazon and Oracle.

Shares of GE (GE) hit a 52-week high of $32.50 before closing Monday at $32.21, up 0.03% for the day.

Predix is based on Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry developer platform, and was created specifically to provide the industrial sector with a secure cloud environment for capturing and analysing data for analytics. The company’s stock experienced a 32% surge over the last 12 months. To that end, Microsoft is making Azure Stack available only through pre-validated hardware partners, instead of releasing it as a solution that customers can deploy, manage and customize.