 7 august 2018 porterbrook has entered into a strategic partnership with elastacloud the leading microsoft data and artificial intelligence partner to build innovative data solutions for the rail sector the two companies have already identified at least thirty kpis across the rolling stock sector that might be improved through artificial intelligence and that will benefit both porterbrook customers and rail users the partnership aligns with porterbrooks overall vision of being the uk market leading provider of rail leasing and asset management support the agreement sees elastacloud share its market leading artificial intelligence intellectual property with porterbrook with the objective of delivering improvements in key areas principally train performance and maintenance optimisation mary grant porterbrook ceo said we are enormously excited to be working with elastacloud our industry produces large volumes of data that we all too easily ignore by intelligently analysing this data we can make real improvements to both customer fleets and passenger journeys andy cross elastacloud director said elastacloud are thrilled to be working with porterbrook elastaclouds team of data scientists have proven experience in helping businesses successfully grow reliability and optimise asset performance we look forward to helping porterbrook unlock their data so they can do the same in rail elastacloud brings a wealth of ai experience to the rail sector having successfully mined data in the aerospace retail and energy sectors 