Microsoft Germany and ifm electronic announced a partnership today at the Hannover Messe trade fair. The aim is to jointly develop ifm solutions for the Industrial IoT (IIoT) based on Microsoft Azure. The two companies want to generate added value for their mutual customers in their IIoT applications.

“By choosing Microsoft as our partner and Azure as the platform for our IIoT solutions, we want to make innovative technologies as accessible as possible to our customers,” said Michael Marhofer, CEO of ifm, at the signing ceremony. “Digitalization and the use of modern technologies play an important role in the transformation of industry in Germany,” explains Florian Deter, Managing Director of Microsoft Germany and responsible for key account business. “Companies such as ifm achieve extensive added value and competitive advantages by integrating Microsoft technologies into their processes and solutions.”

The cooperation between ifm and Microsoft has already yielded initial results. The new remoteConnect module, part of the moneo IIoT cloud solution, is based on Microsoft Azure. Users can use it to implement secure monitoring and remote maintenance of machines and systems. In the future, more and more ifm products will be developed to be “Azure ready.” This will not only affect the software products of the moneo IIoT suite, but also hardware such as edge gateways or sensors, which will be very easy to integrate into user operating environments based on Microsoft Azure. This seamless integration will also remove barriers for users when it comes to obtaining important information more easily and quickly from the data generated by machines and systems through the use of AI applications. In the future, for example, evaluations of this data could be generated using natural language. The functionalities for IIoT applications would then be similar to the possibilities that Microsoft Copilot already offers in many areas today.

The collaboration with Microsoft and the use of artificial intelligence will also advance ifm in other areas. Typical examples are after-sales services and support, where the aim is to find information very quickly and in a targeted manner and make it available to the customer. Using the example of the exhibit with the moneo IIoT cloud solution at the ifm booth, the two companies are demonstrating where the journey will take us in the future.