Internet of Industrial Things: Microsoft, GE Announce Cloud Partnership

On the heels of June’s announcement to acquire LinkedIn, Microsoft announced their newest milestone partnership with General Electric. Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference kicked off in Toronto yesterday with 15,000 partners attending from 144 countries. In this Monday’s keynote address, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt announced that GE will now make GE’s Predix industrial software platform available on Microsoft’s Azure.

“We see in Azure not just a great cloud technology, but it’s a platform on which other platforms can go,” said Immelt on Monday. Predix is GE’s industrial IoT platform which is already available on both Amazon’s and Oracle’s clouds however this partnership better positions Microsoft to build Azure’s enterprise appeal.

“Every industry and every company around the world is being transformed by digital technology,” said Nadella in a recent press release. “Working with companies like GE, we can reach a new set of customers to help them accelerate their transformation across every line of business — from the factory floor to smart buildings.”

GE sees this as their next step in leveraging Microsoft’s network to expand Predix’s reach and capabilities:

“Our idea is to put real industrial strength and analytically based asset performance management inside of Azure to open up Predix,” said Immelt. “Connecting industrial machines to the internet through the cloud is a huge step toward simplifying business processes and reimagining how work gets done … GE is helping its customers extract value from the vast quantities of data coming out of those machines and is building an ecosystem of industry-leading partners like Microsoft that will allow the Industrial Internet to thrive on a global scale.”