General Electric (GE) has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud provider, according to an Amazon announcement.

In a short note, Amazon said GE ‘continues to migrate thousands of core applications to AWS’, and that many of its cloud apps on businesses such as aviation, healthcare and transportation, run on Amazon’s cloud. GE began an enterprise-wide migration in 2014 and has migrated more than 2,000 applications in that time.

GE’s focus on digital is crystal clear. As Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, pointed out in a speech last year, it is the only company still standing from the original 12 listed on the original Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1896. Writing on LinkedIn last month, GE CEO and chairman John Flannery said the decision to go ‘all-in’ on digital was an easy one.

“We have fully embraced the digital industrial transformation, and we believe in its potential to change the world,” he wrote. “For our customers, digital is bringing new levels of innovation and productivity – and they are seeing real, tangible outcomes. Now, we are taking these outcomes and transferring what we have learned directly to our customers.”

GE’s commitment to cloud has similarly shone through. Alongside AWS, the behemoth had previously inked deals with Microsoft in 2015, moving 300,000 employees over to Office 365, and Box in 2014 for content sharing and collaboration.

“Adopting a cloud-first strategy with AWS is helping our IT teams get out of the business of building and running data centres and refocus our resources on innovation as we undergo one of the largest and most important transformations in GE’s history,” said Chris Drumgoole, General Electric chief technology officer and corporate vice president in a statement.

“We chose AWS as the preferred cloud provider for GE because AWS’s industry leading cloud services have allowed us to push the boundaries, think big, and deliver better outcomes for GE,” Drumgoole added.