XPE Lounge, page-734

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2016/08/02/ge-internet-predix-microsoft-azure-cloud/id=71153/

Extract

Partnership to bring GE’s industrial Internet platform Predix to Microsoft’s growing Azure cloud
By Steve Brachmann
August 2, 2016


One of the companies which has positioned itself strongly in the industrial Internet sector is American conglomerate General Electric (NYSE:GE) of Fairfield, CT. This company has been melding the massive industrial machinery it manufactures, such as wind turbines and aircraft engines, with sensor networks and computer software platforms which allow the company to better ensure the operational efficacy of its equipment. A 2015 study of the industrial Internet’s impacts on corporations produced by GE and strategy firm Accenture indicates that big data analytics were within the top three priorities for 80 to 90 percent of corporate executives across eight industry sectors; the aviation, wind and power generation industries each eclipsed 90 percent in this regard.

Now General Electric has another major tech firm in its corner which will provide it with the cloud-based platform that should help GE greatly expand the reach of its industrial Internet services. On July 11th, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) of Redmond, WA, announced that its Azure cloud service would make GE’s Predix platform available to industrial consumers. Microsoft is planning full integration of GE’s Predix with a variety of Microsoft applications including Azure IoT Suite, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI.

Predix is a platform as a service (PaaS) solution for industrial customers looking to develop software apps which take machine data and parse it with analytics to improve performance or stay ahead of necessary maintenance. GE has spent more than $1 billion in recent years to develop the platform but the company expects the service to be profitable. Last September, GE representatives announced that Predix had already brought in $5 billion in revenues and the company expected an additional $6 billion in future sales.

General Electric’s hope is that its PaaS Predix platform can be scaled up greatly by Microsoft’s Azure cloud to reach a wide audience of industrial customers. Azure offers infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud solutions which host platforms like Predix in managed data centers. Microsoft’s earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2016, which the company released on July 19th, indicated that server products and cloud service revenues increased by $253 million during the quarter based on Azure’s year-over-year revenue growth of 102 percent for the fourth quarter. That same day, global technology consulting firm Gartner released a technical assessment of IaaS services and Azure was rated second-best out of the three major infrastructure providers, being edged slightly by Amazon Web Services in the overall ranking. In a recent blog post typed by a Microsoft executive, the company announced that Azure Stack, a turnkey integrated system which will allow Azure customers to run Microsoft’s cloud services on their own data centers, will be released to consumers in the middle of the 2017 calendar year.


Further dots joining:


Intel IOT Gateway * ~ Intel Quark ~ Xped * ~ ADRC ~ Telink ~ GE *~ GE Predix *~ Intel (Intel IOT Gateway/Intel processors) *

* Microsoft (Microsoft Azure) (with Xped's Xert and Product Registration System and the Big Data system)

Wow! wow! wow!............ and there will be more ecosystems .....


PDYOR