(Image courtesy of GE Reports.)
Incompatibilities between IIoT assets and equipment make it difficult for manufacturers to control systems, track performance and assess cost.
However, the recently announced partnership between GE and Microsoft aims to solve this problem by supporting integration of a range of industrial platforms.
GE’s Predix IIoT operating system connects to industrial machines and assets to collect and analyze data, where as Microsoft’s Azure cloud and its IoT suite provide the communication path to interconnect facilities and locations.
In other words, connecting industrial assets as well as collecting and analyzing data is the primary role of GE Predix. GE’s operating system and applications platform enable developers to interconnect machines and resources, gather and exchange data among these resources, and consolidate information for analysis. Finally, the analysis capability provides the means to optimize operations in real-time.
Microsoft Azure, on the other hand, is a collection of integrated and interconnected cloud services. Engineers use pre-built templates and managed services to ease the development of new applications. Engineers also gain access to a suite of tools supported in Visual Studio 2015 to leverage a common and widely used integrated development environment to speed up the development time. The suite also focuses on the management of enterprise, mobile, Web and IoT applications.
Integrating Predix into Azure combines the analysis and data collection capability of Predix with the networking resources of Azure to help support the growth of the IIoT. Access to Azure’s large cloud footprint, data sovereignty, hybrid capabilities and developer and data services results from this collaboration.
The partnership also ensures that future releases will integrate Cortana Intelligence Suite and Microsoft business applications in order to provide a path for the business analysis of industrial data.
To see how the IoT and Predix can support your product development, read “GE and ANSYS Team Up to Bring IoT Data into Simulations.”