Dive Brief:
- GE and Microsoft Corp. announced Monday plans to partner on a number of efforts to help industrial businesses digitally transform by leveraging IoT data with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
- One of the first steps in the collaboration will make GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet available on the Azure cloud.
- Combining Predix and Azure will give industrial companies access to new capabilities such as natural language technology, artificial intelligence, advanced data visualization and enterprise application integration, according to Microsoft.
Dive Insight:
Microsoft said Predix on Azure will be available by the second quarter of 2017.
As consumer technology markets stagnate, companies like Microsoft and Apple are focusing more of their efforts on enterprise customers and business applications.
Last year, Gartner predicted there will be 25 billion or more IoT devices connected to the Internet by 2020. Those devices will produce a huge amount of data, and Microsoft’s Azure or other cloud service providers are aiming to help facilitate data storage efforts.
“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 CEO Jeff Immelt.
