UPDATED 11:03 EDT / JULY 12 2016

NEWS

GE is bringing its Internet of Things platform to Microsoft’s cloud

The star of Microsoft Corp.’s annual partner event in Toronto this week isn’t one of its numerous allies from the software market or the data center equipment world, but rather General Electric Co. Jeff Immelt, the industrial giant’s chief executive, appeared on the stage yesterday with Satya Nadella to announce that their firms are joining forces to help organizations analyze the vast volumes of data coming off the connected universe.

The collaboration will see GE’s Predix platform-as-a-service stack, a Cloud Foundry distribution specifically optimized for handling machine-generated logs, made available on Microsoft Azure by the end of the year. The vendors then plan to test the port with a limited number of users for another six months or so before making it generally availability in the second quarter of 2017. According to their official press release, the final version will provide integration with several of the analytics tools available in Redmond’s public as well as its managed productivity services.

The list includes Office 365, Power BI and Dynamics 365, a newly unveiled business automation suite that is set to combine the capabilities of Microsoft’s sales optimization and resource management offerings. Both the software giant and GE stands to benefit a great deal from the integration, but the latter vendor has especially much to gain. First, the move should make Predix more appealing for the many organizations that already analyze their data in Azure. And second, it will allow the industrial giant to take advantage of the public cloud’s global footprint when trying to secure new accounts.

Microsoft has more cloud data centers than many of its rivals, which means that customers can deploy Predix closer to their infrastructure and thereby reduce latency. Given how data generated in the connected universe is often time-sensitive, that’s a major benefit. A U.S.-based electronics maker, for instance, could use Azure to spin up Predix instances in the countries where its offshore factories are based and create a separate deployment stateside to support its main analytics environment. Those remote instances would make it possible to process production data while it’s still fresh and quickly pass on the results to the decision makers in the field.

For Microsoft, meanwhile, the move levels the playing field against Amazon Inc. and Oracle Inc., which already support Predix in their rivaling clouds. GE will likely partner with yet more providers in the future as part of its efforts to broaden the appeal of the platform. One likely candidate is IBM Corp., whose infrastructure-as-a-service platform places a big emphasis on analytics. For more on the GE’s plans, check out SiliconANGLE’s interview with the head of its software business, Bill Ruh, below.

Image via Pixabay

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