AWS Declares Its Status As GE’s ‘Preferred Cloud’

General Electric (GE), announced this week that it is supporting Amazon Web Services (AWS), as its preferred cloud provider.
GE was founded over 100 years ago. Since 2011, the company has been making efforts to transform itself into a “digital industrial” business. However, it has not always been easy. Predix Cloud, GE’s industrial cloud platform, was launched in 2015. The company plans to operate it from its own datacenters, which were not yet built.
GE abandoned this strategy a year later, citing huge competitive advantages of hyperscale cloud provider like AWS and Microsoft Azure. These providers have spent the past few decades aggressively building their datacenter infrastructures around the world. GE decided to instead of running Predix from its own cloud datacenters and instead use AWS and Azure.
GE announced that it was partnering up with Microsoft to offer Predix for Azure in mid-2016. Additional integrations are on the horizon. GE’s relationship to AWS extends further; Predix Cloud was built from an earlier data analytics platform that GE and Accenture developed together with AWS.
AWS is being used by GE to power its customer-facing offerings. However, GE also uses it to streamline its internal operations. In 2014, GE began a three year process to migrate over 9,000 workloads from its 34 datacenters to AWS.
AWS announced this week that GE had already moved over 2,000 internal apps to its cloud. Several GE business units, including GE Power and GE Aviation, GE Healthcare and GE Digital, are now running the bulk their applications on AWS.
“Adopting a cloud first strategy with AWS is helping IT teams get out the business of building and managing data centers and refocus their resources on innovation as GE undergoes one of the most significant transformations in its history,” stated Chris Drumgoole (GE’s CTO, corporate vice president) in a statement. AWS was chosen by GE as its preferred cloud provider because of its industry-leading cloud services. This has allowed us to think big and deliver better results for GE.