By bringing together industrial thought and technology leaders, the alliance expands the company’s continuing relationship with Microsoft and will afford end users cloud-based offerings in the manufacturing and infrastructure operations space.
"As Microsoft's Alliance ISV Industry Partner of the Year in 2011, we are excited to enter into this alliance, which further defines our position as a leading provider of automation solutions that help optimize manufacturing business operations in real time," said Ravi Gopinath, president, Invensys Operations Management's software business. "Working with Microsoft reinforces the strategic alignment between our two companies, with a mutual goal of using Windows Azure technology to bring leading-edge cloud solutions to the industrial market. By offering cloud-based variants of our existing Historian and business process management solutions, we can help our customers lower costs, reduce systems complexity and cut hardware and software investments, while creating a high-performance environment for more agile operations management."
Within the alliance, Microsoft will help Invensys accelerate the development of its Wonderware Historian and Workflow applications to enable them to run on the Windows Azure cloud. Initial development activities will extend existing Invensys solutions with managed history and reporting capabilities, as well as business process management on demand.
"Invensys is an example of how Microsoft continues to work with companies that use our platforms to build the solutions their manufacturing customers need to address the critical operating issues they face each and every day," said Walid Abu-Hadba, corporate vice president, developer and platform evangelism, at Microsoft. “Providing cloud-based reporting and collaboration services allows these customers to pay for what they use, which means they can better scale and manage their technology deployment costs. It’s an attractive model for any customer that has widely distributed operations, limited IT resources or the need to rapidly scale. Customers will have the choice of different usage models, so they pay for only what they need."
