Nokia, Finnish telecom gear maker, on Monday extended its partnership with Microsoft and mentioned that it will integrate Azure Arc capabilities into the Nokia MX Industrial Edge (MXIE) platform, in a move that will unlock the potential of mission-critical applications for Industry 4.0 cases.

Through the integration, Nokia MXIE and private wireless solution customers have seamless access to the full Azure ecosystem offering on MXIE, an official statement noted.

The integration aims to support industries including automotive, manufacturing, energy, logistics and government, and will enable use cases by allowing customers to run applications in the traditional cloud and directly on-premises, it added.

Collaboration in these areas will provide numerous benefits such as increasing worker safety through AI and automation while decreasing the amount of needed backhaul with local data processing

Microsoft Azure Arc running on Nokia MXIE will provide enterprises with added access to Azure capabilities while benefiting from private wireless connected assets’ real-time data and on-premise, highly-resilient OT-centric edge processing.

“Our extended collaboration with Microsoft will enable and enhance the performance of Industry 4.0 mission critical applications allowing our customers to tap into Microsoft Azure Arc in the cloud and on the customer premise’s edge,” said Stephan Litjens, Vice President, Nokia Enterprise Solution.

“With Microsoft Azure Arc, a wide ecosystem of applications, and our long standing work with Nokia, we can provide AI-powered insights and identify solutions to workflow issues for mission critical Industry 4.0 applications running at the edge,” said Keith Sutton, CTO, Telco Service Line at Microsoft.