GE and Microsoft Enter Their Largest Partnership to Date

GE and Microsoft announced an expanded partnership, bringing together operational technology and information technology to eliminate hurdles industrial companies face in advancing digital transformation projects. As part of the union, GE Digital plans to standardize its Predix solutions on Microsoft Azure and will deeply integrate the Predix portfolio with Azure’s native cloud capabilities, including Azure IoT and Azure Data and Analytics.

The parties will also co-sell and go-to-market together, offering end customers premier Industrial IoT (IIoT) solutions across verticals. In addition, GE will leverage Microsoft Azure across its business for additional IT workloads and productivity tools, including internal Predix-based deployments, to drive innovation across the company. The partnership should help industrial customers streamline their digital transformations by combining GE Digital’s IIoT solutions that ingest, store, analyze and act on data to drive greater insight with Microsoft’s cloud footprint.

GE Digital’s Predix is the application development platform that equips industrial organizations with everything they need to rapidly build, securely deploy and effectively run IIoT applications from edge to cloud, turning asset data into actionable insights. Leading industrial companies are using GE Digital’s solutions as well as thousands of Predix-based apps created by customers and partners to improve operations and efficiency of their assets. The partnership brings together GE Digital’s expertise in industrial data and applications with Microsoft’s enterprise cloud, helping customers speed deployment of industrial applications and achieve tangible outcomes faster, ultimately fueling growth and business innovation.

GE also plans to leverage Azure across the company for a wide range of IT workloads and productivity tools, accelerating digital innovation and driving efficiencies. This partnership also enables the different GE businesses to tap into Microsoft’s advanced enterprise capabilities, which will support the petabytes of data managed by the Predix platform, such as GE’s monitoring and diagnostics centers, internal manufacturing and services programs.