Willow was featured yesterday in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote address at the Innovate Conference in Sydney. This is the second time this month that Willow has been presented at a major Microsoft event, with Nadella also including Willow in his keynote address at the Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando a few weeks ago. Press reports of Sayta Nadella mentioning Willow favourably in the Australian, the AFR and SMH/Age today are listed below.
Nadella specifically outlined Willow’s product offering for the rail industry, WillowRail. He noted that “Willow is building out a quintessential new workload for distributed computing, to see what is happening in a railroad… Just imagine, all the tracks, all the sensors – everything that is happening as an operation – is in fact being mirrored as a digital twin and then that digital twin is being used to streamline the entire operation.“
As succinctly explained by Nadella, WillowRail is a rail asset management solution that integrates existing disparate and isolated datasets from multiple operational systems into one interface. This provides rail operators, managers and maintenance work groups with holistic oversight over their rail network, thereby improving the performance, management and experience of rail networks. Today, WillowRail is being deployed across 3,000 kilometres of track in Europe and will be used by over 3,500 field staff in the management and maintenance of rail networks.
The specific articles in the Australian press including the Australian Financial Review, The Australian, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald are listed here:
- AFR: (Satya) “The most exciting work happening in the cloud is happening at the edge of the cloud, and in fact right here in Australia there’s a company called Willow which is basically building a digital twin for railway operations. An industry which is a core part of the industrial revolution.”
- SMH/THE AGE: He (Satya) referred to another Australian company, Willow, which is creating “digital twins” of the real world by installing digital sensors in industrial settings. This includes railway lines in Australia. “All of that data is being collected in real time in a digital twin and then is being used to make it more efficient,” he said.
- AUSTRALIAN: To address this, Microsoft recently announced Azure Edge as a multi-edge, multi-cloud infrastructure. Mr Nadella briefly cited examples of Australian companies it is collaborating with. There’s Willow Rail’s application for managing railways, which he says involves everything in its operation being mirrored as a “digital twin.”