L&T Infotech, a global information technology services & solutions company, announced a strategic partnership with GE Digital combining LTI's diverse industrial capabilities with GE's Predix cloud-based operating system for the Industrial Internet. LTI and GE Digital will collaborate to develop innovative digital-industrial solutions powered by Predix analytics and real-time insights to enhance competitiveness and transform the way companies manage their assets and workforce.

Weatherford International plc announced that it has signed a Joint Initiative Agreement (JIA) with IBM to collaborate on the development of new products and services for oil and gas producers that leverage IBM advanced analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities on the IBM Cloud and further strengthen Weatherford's production optimization technologies.

General Electric Co. said it would partner with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to develop smart machines designed to boost productivity, part of a drive to promote its "industrial internet" business in China.

IBM and AT&T announced they are working together to help businesses accelerate their Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives. The two companies will combine their unique strengths in cognitive computing and global connectivity to create open standards-based tools on the IBM Cloud to enable developers to more quickly build and implement a wide variety of IoT solutions. As businesses discover the need to more efficiently develop and bring IoT solutions to market, they must invest in developers to stay competitive.

VDMA Machine Vision and the OPC Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the preparation of an OPC UA Machine Vision Companion Specification.  This was announced at the AUTOMATICA trade fair.  The resolution was preceded by an international study under the lead of VDMA Machine Vision last summer. It was aimed at showing which standards are important to prepare the machine vision sector for the future.

GE and Microsoft Corp. announced a partnership that will make GE's Predix platform for the Industrial Internet available on the Microsoft Azure cloud for industrial businesses. The move marks the first step in a broad strategic collaboration between the two companies, which will allow customers to capture intelligence from their industrial assets and leverage Microsoft's enterprise cloud applications.

Emerson and StepChange Global have combined their technology and consulting expertise to help producers increase production and cut operational costs by developing, implementing, and evolving best practices with Integrated Operations (iOps) and Digital Oilfield. An effective iOps solution helps users improve profitability through better access to real-time data and information, innovative technology, and its integration into a collaborative organization.

Hitachi, Ltd. announced that along with Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and Intel K.K. (Japan), it proposed, and received approval for a Factory Automation Platform as a Service (FA PaaS) Testbed in the field of next-generation factories at the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).

IBM and Cisco announced they will partner to combine the market-leading strengths of each company to transform how knowledge-workers collaborate and work. The companies will form a suite of cloud-based workplace tools and applications infused with IBM Watson.

As part of the transformation, the highly secure Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms will be integrated with IBM's leading cloud collaboration solutions, including Verse and Connections, and underpinned by IBM's cognitive computing capabilities.

Infor announced the acquisition of Predictix, a provider of cloud-native, predictive, and machine-learning solutions for retailers. Predictix uses next-generation data science and big data analytics to help solve some of the most complex and challenging problems faced by retailers today. Predictix will become part of Infor CloudSuite Retail, a new modern suite of enterprise applications delivered in the cloud and designed for today's retailing landscape. The acquisition comes six months after Infor announced an investment in Predictix.