GE Digital will make its Predix industrial Internet of Things (IoT) platform available on Microsoft Azure.

The deal, which was announced July 11 by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and GE CEO Jeff Immelt, will mean that GE customers using Predix will have access to Azure’s cloud footprint. Plus, GE and Microsoft plan to integrate the Predix IoT platform with the Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite, along with Microsoft business applications such as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power BI. This will mean that GE’s Predix customers will also have access to new capabilities like advanced data visualization, artificial intelligence, and more.

By year-end, the two companies plan to release a developer preview. Predix on Azure will be commercially available by the second quarter of 2017.

GE has been busy racking up partnerships for its Predix platform-as-a-service (PaaS). Last month the company teamed with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to combine Predix with HPE’s hardware and to deliver real-time analytics from the edge to the cloud. In addition, GE will use HPE for its virtual infrastructure.

IoT partnerships are becoming commonplace as companies strive to make it easier to implement IoT strategies. In June, IBM announced it was collaborating with Cisco to combine its IoT technology and business analytics with Cisco’s edge analytics to give customers better access to real-time data from the cloud to the edge of the network.

GE Digital launched Predix at Mobile World Congress in February, and so far it has attracted more than 11,000 developers. The company expects Predix to generate about $6 billion in revenue in 2015 and $15 billion in revenue by 2020.

In an interview with SDxCentral last month, Abhi Kunte, global head of technology and strategy alliances for GE Digital, said that so far developers have created about 50 applications on GE's platform.