MicrosoftManufacturingIT Operations AutomationAI and Machine LearningCloud NativeCost OptimizationCost ReductionProductivity Improvement2024MicrosoftMS#0078d4ManufacturingUnited Arab EmiratesMany manufacturing technology applications, including AI, must have proximity to company equipment for cybersecurity, latency, response time, and other factors. “We want AI decisions about our plant to be done with as…The new platform reduces the cost of image and video analytics by 86 percent and decreases AI response times by…Jun 20, 20246IT Operations AutomationAzure Arc · Azure Stack HCI02024-06-206
Many manufacturing technology applications, including AI, must have proximity to company equipment for cybersecurity, latency, response time, and other factors. “We want AI decisions about our plant to be done with as little outside exposure and with as little reliance on networks and the internet as possible—and fully disconnected, if necessary,” explains Kraehenbuehl.
↗The new platform reduces the cost of image and video analytics by 86 percent and decreases AI response times by a factor of 13.
↗“If you compare costs for our current use cases on the public cloud before and on our new Azure hybrid cloud digital manufacturing platform, we’re looking at an 86 percent cost reduction.
Reported impact
Business outcome
The company only needed three months to ramp up the digital manufacturing platform from conceptualization to having a first instance of the environment running at the edge and now operating multiple production workloads. The added efficiency and productivity brought on by the platform underscores EGA’s use of Microsoft’s adaptive cloud approach to fundamentally rethink and modernize operational technology in a cloud-first era and embrace modern capabilities, such as generative AI.
Cost Reduction
Productivity Improvement
Solution
Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) is on a bold trajectory to become a digital lighthouse for the United Arab Emirates and the aluminum industry worldwide. To achieve this, the company is enhancing its world-class metal and mining value chain with a digital value chain centered around data and AI. The company drastically transformed its manufacturing operations by harnessing a triad of innovative Microsoft Azure technologies—Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc, and Azure Kubernetes Service—as it established a game-changing digital manufacturing platform. The new platform reduces the cost of image and video analytics by 86 percent and decreases AI response times by a factor of 13. The seamless hybrid cloud architecture allows use cases to deploy several times a day to keep up with today’s business agility and helps EGA pursue more demanding use cases with its Industry 4.0 program than ever before.
Solution architecture
2 components · 2 layers
Compute
Azure Stack HCIProvides on-premises hyperconverged infrastructure for running cost-efficient AI workloads.
Governance
Azure ArcExtends Azure management and governance to distributed or hybrid infrastructure.
Architecture clues
Bringing together public and hybrid clouds, EGA built a new digital manufacturing platform with a hybrid cloud architecture.
The company drastically transformed its manufacturing operations by harnessing a triad of innovative Microsoft Azure technologies—Azure Stack HCI, Azure Arc, and Azure Kubernetes Service—as it established a game-changing digital manufacturing platform.
The new platform reduces the cost of image and video analytics by 86 percent and decreases AI response times by a factor of 13.
They recently joined forces to move one-third of EGA’s server landscape from on-premises datacenters to the Azure public cloud, consolidating more than 600 servers in the process.
To achieve this, the company is enhancing its world-class metal and mining value chain with a digital value chain centered around data and AI.
“With its seamless hybrid cloud architecture, our new digital manufacturing platform outperforms our previous approach by orders of magnitude in terms of cost efficiency, AI response time, and business agility, allowing us to push the frontiers of our digital ambition.”
Evidence from the source
Both EGA and Microsoft are members of the UAE Industry 4.0 Champions Network, which is dedicated to accelerating and promoting a new wave of innovation in the country.
Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA) is on a bold trajectory to become a digital lighthouse for the United Arab Emirates and the aluminum industry worldwide.
It runs Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on top of Azure Stack HCI to take advantage of containerization on-premises and uses Azure Arc for a consistent management layer across its public and hybrid cloud environments.
To achieve this, the company is enhancing its world-class metal and mining value chain with a digital value chain centered around data and AI.
“Through Azure Stack HCI, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Arc, our data, AI, and applications can move effortlessly between the public and private cloud components of our digital manufacturing platform,” says Kraehenbuehl.
“With its seamless hybrid cloud architecture, our new digital manufacturing platform outperforms our previous approach by orders of magnitude in terms of cost efficiency, AI response time, and business agility, allowing us to push the frontiers of our digital ambition.”
Review how this reference was scored and trace each normalized claim back to its documented source.
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Scoring methodology
How scores are calculated
Customer Reference Value measures usefulness as a customer reference. Evidence Confidence measures the quality and traceability of available evidence, not independent verification.
Customer reference value85/100
Problem clarity20/20
Measures whether the customer's operational problem is specific enough to compare.
Implementation depth15/25
Rewards named components, data flow, integrations, and architecture detail.
Outcome specificity20/20
Measures whether the reported benefit is concrete rather than a generic claim.
Quantified impact25/25
2 metrics describe measurable impact.
Deployment scale5/10
Rewards evidence of a live or scaled deployment and meaningful integration scope.
Evidence confidence87%
Source authority20/25
The main evidence is an official vendor-published customer story.
Claim traceability21/25
10 of 12 key fields link to a named source.
Direct evidence20/20
6 direct source quotes retained.
Date provenance10/10
The publication date comes from the source page or publisher.
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