GE, Microsoft join hands to bring Predix as platform-as-a-service for Azure cloud

GE and Microsoft have joined hands to bring the industrial giant's Predix platform-as-a-service offering to the Azure cloud, the two companies announced yesterday.

According to commentators, the move would help add to the portfolio of Internet of Things services available through Microsoft's cloud platform, at a time when the company had been pushing its service for IoT applications.

The announcement came during the course of an onstage interaction at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, between GE CEO Jeff Immelt and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Predix, a platform-as-a-service offering had been designed for building applications that had industrial uses. Predix services that developers could tap into include asset management and anomaly detection offerings, among others.

The cloud deal forms part of a larger partnership between the two companies. The companies plan to better integrate Predix into a variety of products including Azure's IoT Suite and Cortana Analytics Suite. Predix's integrations were also slated to encompass productivity tools including Dynamics 365, Office 365 and Power BI.

The announcement comes after several Microsoft partnerships in the cloud software space. The company had also been working with a wide variety of other service providers including SAP and Red Hat.

Meanwhile, with the ''Cloud first, Mobile first'' strategy, Microsoft was seeing a major growth in the Infrastructure as a Service market. In fact, Azure cloud providers are said to be leveling up with Amazon Web Services, according to Morgan Stanley's 2016 CIO survey. It might also be possible that Azure could leave Amazon Web Services behind in the next three years.

Meanwhile, cloud monitoring service Datadog is supporting Microsoft Azure Resource Manager (ARM) which aims to provide larger enterprises with the essential information they need. With ARM, businesses can view graphics and stats for the application's cloud usage, CPU, storage, network use, and more.

Datadog chief product officer, Amit Agarwal told Businesswire:

''We make it a top priority to build out integrations for new services from major cloud platforms as they are released. By utilizing Datadog, enterprise customers are now able to effectively manage the performance of their large scale Microsoft Azure-hosted applications.''