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Microsoft and Honeywell are partnering to integrate Honeywell Forge industrial analytics platform with Azure and Dynamic 365 Field Service. The partnership is aimed at helping enterprises optimize how they manage physical assets like machinery.

Honeywell is a prominent manufacturer of industrial equipment and other related products. The company had a revenue of more than $36 billion in 2019. The company’s Honeywell Forge platform brings together a collection of cloud apps that help companies analyze sensor data from their IoT systems and improve daily operations.

Manufacturers can use it to analyze diagnostics from production lines and solve potential issues.

The role played by the cloud

The partnership will ensure the integration of Honeywell Forge with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service Software. Companies use the software to assign repair work to technicians and give them adequate and accurate information to fix issues.

With this partnership, customers will streamline logistics to deliver maintenance through the consolidation of workflows on Dynamics 365 Field Service and Honeywell Forge.

The plan for most companies is to connect Honeywell Forge to several services in Azure. This will allow the creation of virtual replicas of physical assets that can be used in simulations to improve efficiency.

The public cloud giants are circling

The industrial sector has been a big part of Microsoft’s cloud strategy in recent years. The company spent $165 million to buy CyberX, a security startup that focuses on protecting industrial equipment from hacking.

Microsoft even recently added new tools to Azure to enable users to work with digital twins.

The software giant’s rivals are also eyeing this market. Amazon Web Services offers SiteWise, a service they launched in July to analyze sensory data from industrial equipment. Google is working on how to get into the market and could leverage its public cloud to get a leg up.