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GE and Microsoft announced today that starting Nov. 30, North American customers and developers using Predix, GE’s application development platform for the Industrial Internet, will be able to build powerful industrial apps on Microsoft Azure, the cloud for enterprises. The Predix-Azure combination will expand to additional markets next year.
John Flannery, GE chairman and CEO, and Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, made the announcement at Minds + Machines, GE’s flagship industrial software conference taking place this week in San Francisco.
“It’s really two market leaders coming together to accelerate the adoption on the Industrial Internet of Things,” says Kevin Ichhpurani, GE Digital’s executive vice president in charge of ecosystem and channels. “It’s one of the biggest value drivers for customers.”
Experts estimate productivity gains from connecting jet engines, gas turbines and locomotives to the Industrial Internet of Things and using it to make them work better will add $10 trillion to $15 trillion to global GDP — the size of the U.S. economy today — in coming years. “We are bending the productivity curve … [for industrial customers] looking to digitize their products, be it a jet engine or an elevator,” says Kevin Dallas, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of business development, Intelligent Cloud. He says that the notion of shipping a machine and not being able to communicate with it and gain insight into how it’s being used “is a thing of the past.”
Dallas says that insights delivered by Predix apps built on Azure will allow users to transform products, optimize operations, empower employees and improve communications with customers.
Ichhpurani says that Predix developers will benefit from a network of Azure regions sprinkled all over the globe. He says that customers can use them to get “instant access,” work with real-time data and build apps without switching between different platforms.
Ichhpurani says that customers have been calling for closer integration with Azure since GE first announced its partnership with Microsoft last year. He says that many companies using Predix are already storing data and running enterprise software from Oracle, SAP and other providers on Azure. “It’s now sitting in the same cloud,” he says. Dallas says that the solution has “the right connectors that allow you to communicate seamlessly with [Microsoft] Office … as well as existing business applications that may use SAP,” for example.
But Dallas says the collaboration between GE and Microsoft extends beyond apps, products and efficient data integration. “This is a very unique element of this partnership,” he says. “Many [GE] customers in oil and gas, transportation, energy and healthcare are Microsoft customers. The intent is to go to market together.”
