Microsoft Corp. is teaming up with Honeywell International Inc. to integrate the Honeywell Forge industrial analytics platform with the Dynamics 365 Field Service offering and Azure.

The partnership, announced Thursday, is aimed at helping enterprises optimize they manage physical assets such as commercial machinery.

Honeywell is a major manufacturer of industrial equipment and related products with annual revenues of more than $36 billion as of 2019. The Honeywell Forge platform is a collection of cloud applications designed to help companies analyze sensor data from their “internet of things” systems to improve day-to-day operations. Manufacturers, for instance, can use it to analyze diagnostics logs from production line machines to identify issues.

Under the partnership, Honeywell will integrate Honeywell Forge with Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Field Service software. The software is used by companies to assign repair work to technicians and provide them with information necessary to carry out troubleshooting, such as sensory logs from a malfunctioning engine. The integration will enable enterprises to make relevant diagnostics information from Honeywell Forge available to their technicians via the Dynamics 365 Field Service interface.

On launch, the integration focuses on just one initial use case: building management. Maintenance is a substantial expense for building operators because there are numerous different systems, from air conditioning units to the elevator, that require technicians’ attention. Microsoft and Honeywell say that their integration will allow customers to streamline the logistics involved in delivering maintenance by consolidating workflows on Dynamics 365 Field Service and Honeywell Forge.  

The companies will also target other use cases further down the line. They plan to connect Honeywell Forge with a number of services from Microsoft’s Azure public cloud including Azure Digital Twins, which makes it possible to create virtual replicas of physical assets and use them in simulations to identify ways of improving operational efficiency.

“By integrating Honeywell and Microsoft services, companies turn IoT data into critical business insights and actions to optimize operations and deliver new customer value faster,” said Judson Althoff, the executive vice president of Microsoft’s Worldwide Commercial Business.

The industrial sector become a major focus in Microsoft’s cloud strategy over recent years. It spent a reported $165 million this year to buy CyberX Inc., a cybersecurity startup focused on protecting industrial equipment from hacking, and more recently introduced new tools in Azure for working with digital twins.

Microsoft’s cloud rivals are also targeting this market. Amazon Web Services Inc. offers IoT SiteWise, a service launched in July that can analyze sensory data from industrial equipment, while Google LLC has been making inroads into the market as well recently with its public cloud. 

Image: Microsoft