GE Aviation and Microsoft Partner to Drive Digital Transformation for Airlines

GE Aviation and Microsoft announced they are joining forces to accelerate digital transformation of Aviation, aimed at delivering more robust solutions for the industry. GE Aviation's Digital Solutions business is building on the broad capabilities of Microsoft's Azure, combining GE's data and analytics domain expertise, with the scale of Microsoft Azure.

"Microsoft's cloud, with its strong enterprise capability, including global reach, scale and security were all important in our decision to partner with them," said John Mansfield, chief digital officer for GE Aviation. "The collaboration reinforces our ability to deliver hybrid, on-premise and cloud solutions across the enterprise which is critical for data protection, regulatory and efficiency."

Building on the broad partnership announcement in 2016 at Microsoft's annual partner conference, Microsoft Inspire, and recently expanded relationship, GE Aviation is using Microsoft Azure as its preferred cloud to scale its Analytics and Operations solutions. The partnership with Microsoft is accelerating the global cloud deployment of existing products as well as building new analytic workbench capabilities to enable future services and products.

GE Aviation has a long-standing relationship with Emirates Airlines through GE Aviation's engines and services business, which has recently extended to predictive maintenance and diagnostics.  GE and Emirates have jointly started an effort where the latest digital technologies are employed related to AI and optimization coupled with airlines' operations experience, to develop enhanced integrated resources planning and automation for the day of operations, improving on OTP and passenger experience. Microsoft is acting as the infra cloud partner in this initiative through Azure.

"Coupled with an airlines' operations experience, we're able to develop enhanced integrated resource planning and automation for the day of operations, therefore, improving on-time-performance and passenger experience," Mansfield concluded.

GE Aviation, a part of GE (NYSE: GE), is the world's Digital Industrial Company, transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive.  With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry. www.ge.com/aviation.com