Amazon beams: We're best cloud buds with General Electric

Hey, but aren't you forgetting *cough* Azure? *cough*

Amazon boasts that it is the "preferred" cloud provider for General Electric, but it's a multi-cloud world after all.

GE began moving its applications to the cloud in 2014, with AWS taking the bulk of the dollars. The company has migrated "more than 2,000 applications", we're told.

The thing Amazon won't have mentioned in its marketing materials is that GE is also working with Microsoft. In July, Redmond announced the energy firm was making its industrial applications development platform, Predix, available on Azure.

Reuters also reported in August that after some delays, GE plans to directly use Azure, not just offer its software on it, later this month.

A GE spokesperson told The Register: "GE is migrating its IT applications to AWS, which allows us to focus on building strong internal apps, instead of running our own data centers. The Predix platform already runs on AWS.

"For the Predix platform, our partnership with Microsoft continues as planned. By bringing Predix to Azure, we are helping our mutual customers connect their IT and OT systems to drive actionable intelligence from data. With Microsoft, we have also integrated with tools such as Power BI (which we demonstrated at our Minds + Machines event last year) and have a roadmap for further technical collaboration and integration with additional Microsoft services that we will share later this month."

According to Gartner research, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market grew from $16.8bn in 2015 to $22.1bn in 2016, up 31 per cent. Amazon had revenues of about $9.8bn of IaaS public cloud revenues in 2016 and controlled 44.2 per cent of market share, while Microsoft took in about $1.6bn and held a market share of 7.1 per cent.

GE earned $29.6bn in revenue (GAAP) in the second quarter of 2017. ®