BMW and Microsoft Collaborates to Develop open Manufacturing Platform

BMW and Microsoft Corp have entered in a partnership, Reuters reported on Tuesday. The partnership will see both the companies collaboratively develop open manufacturing platform.

With the new launch, smart factories will be fuelled by innovation and their development process would be boosted. Open-source standards will decide the reference architecture of the new platform.

Microsoft Azure’s IIoT cloud platform will be used to develop an open manufacturing platform.

An open-source standard is amethod created to encourage other partners to join in.

The new partnership comes within a week after Volkswagen and Amazon Web Services joined hands for the same kind of development. Both the partnership highlights an important thing which is described by 'hyperscale' cloud computing providers in regards to the management of data extracted out from the network of connected devices.

Robots and IoT making sensors are the ones that come under the connected devices

According to Microsoft, it will be aiming to have an initial set of four to six partners in place by the end of this year and the minimum number of use cases to be deployed in a production setting is 15.

There are 3,000 machines, robots,and self-driving transport systems under BMW’s belt. Microsoft Azure connects all the mentioned systems through the company’s own IoT platform. The project may have some of the use cases by BMW.

The new partnership will drive innovation for both Microsoft and BMW.