General Electric (GE) and Microsoft have announced a partnership that will enable GE’s Predix platform for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to be run on the Microsoft Azure cloud for industrial businesses. According to the companies, Azure will support the growth of the entire IIoT ecosystem by offering Predix customers access to the largest cloud footprint available today, along with data sovereignty, hybrid capabilities, and advanced developer and data services.
In addition, GE and Microsoft plan to integrate Predix with Azure IoT suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite along with Microsoft business applications, such as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI, in order to connect industrial data with business processes and analytics.
A developer preview will be released toward the end of 2016, and Predix on Azure will be commercially available by mid-2017.