Monday at the Hannover Messe industrial fair, Microsoft Corp. and Rolls-Royce, a leading manufacturer of aero engines for the airline and business aviation market, announced they are collaborating to bring new capabilities to Rolls-Royce customers.

Rolls-Royce will integrate Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite into its service solutions to expand its digital capabilities to support the current and next generation of Rolls-Royce intelligent engines.

Rolls-Royce engines power more than 50,000 flights around the world each month, and the company constantly strives to improve aircraft efficiency, drive up aircraft availability and reduce engine maintenance costs for customers.

To do that, Rolls-Royce offers a broad range of service solutions, including its industry-leading TotalCare® services, focused on keeping its customers’ engines generating maximum value for them. One key to delivering these services is observing trends and anomalies and using the right data to help airlines determine what actions to take to save money or improve operations.

At Hannover Messe, Rolls-Royce and Microsoft will demonstrate how Microsoft will help Rolls-Royce further develop its digital capabilities. Rolls-Royce will tackle some of the greatest airline operational challenges by using Azure IoT Suite to collect and aggregate data from disparate, geographically distributed sources and Cortana Intelligence Suite to uncover data insights.

Data sets such as engine health data, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage data will be collected to detect operational anomalies and trends and then provide intelligent performance feedback on the findings.

Using Azure Stream Analytics and Microsoft Power BI dashboards, the goal is to uncover data insights that will enable airlines to improve their operational performance and increase fuel efficiency.

“Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the digital landscape to increase efficiency and improve their operations,” said Tom Palmer, senior vice president, Services, Civil Aerospace, at Rolls-Royce.

“By working with Microsoft we can really transform our digital services, supporting customers right across engine-related aircraft operations to make a real difference to performance.”

“Rolls-Royce has always been a pioneer in engine services, and this collaboration will create a new digital engine for Rolls-Royce to deliver an even better service to its customers across its world-class engine fleet through Microsoft Azure,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure at Microsoft.

With this collaboration, engine management will move beyond the current levels of proactive monitoring of engine health and inflight performance. Through a greater understanding of flight operations excellence, fuel usage and maintenance planning, Rolls-Royce’s airline customers will be able to better retain asset value throughout an engine’s life cycle, reduce flight disruptions and potentially save millions of dollars per year.