GE Launches Cloud Platform for the Industrial Internet

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The tag line for global giant GE is that it "works on things that matter." That philosophy now extends to the Internet of Things.

GE has launched a first of its kind industrial strength cloud platform for big data and analytics to connect machines and business operations. Built to support the Industrial Internet, GE says the platform is robust enough to manage the data produced by large-scale, industrial machines in the cloud.

The platform will help convert big data into real-time insight, benefiting global industries including aviation, healthcare, energy production and distribution, transportation and manufacturing. In April GE invested $105 million in Pivotal and its Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Combined with GE Predictivity services and technologies available today, airlines, railroads, hospitals and utilities can manage and operate critical machines such as jet engines and gas turbines in the cloud. This will give industrial companies a common architecture, combining intelligent machines, sensors and advanced analytics.

To support its industrial platform, GE announced new Hadoop-based historian data management software called Proficy Historian HD. It delivers real-time data management, analytics, and machine-to-operations connectivity in a secure, closed-loop architecture so industries can move from a reactive to a predictive industrial operating model. The Proficy Monitoring and Analysis suite is comprised of six integrated products: Proficy Historian, GE’s flagship data collection software; Proficy Historian Analysis for data mining and visualization; Proficy SmartSignal for predictive analytics for condition-based monitoring; and Proficy CSense to troubleshoot process problems, monitor process health and create close loop process optimization.

“GE’s industrial strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing," said Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center at GE. "The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement - but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data. This is what the Industrial Internet is about and we are building an ecosystem with partners to save money for our customers and unlock new value for society.”

Expanded Partnerships

GE also announced expanded partnerships with Accenture, Pivotal and Amazon Web Services. Amazon will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its Industrial Internet platform. The Pivotal partnership will be expanded to jointly develop and deploy Industrial Internet solutions leveraging their Cloud Foundry, in-memory and Hadoop-based technology and supporting GE’s strategy of bringing consumer-grade capabilities to the enterprise. A global strategic alliance with Accenture will help develop technology and analytics applications that help companies across industries take advantage of the massive amounts of industrial strength big data that is generated through their business operations.

“Decades of GE-led innovation have helped shape history, and we are excited to work with the GE team to help shape the future of Industrial Big Data,” said Werner Vogels, Amazon Chief Technology Officer. “GE’s domain knowledge and R&D capabilities combined with the strength of AWS’s global infrastructure, breadth of services and big data expertise will help enable customers to solve problems in ways we haven’t even imagined yet, such as improved accuracy in healthcare treatments or extreme levels of energy efficiency.”

“Our research found that an industrial strength cloud environment needs to meet the challenges of integrating large volumes of machine data with data from other sources while executing near real-time analytics," said Jeff Kelly, Big Data Analyst, The Wikibon Project. "GE is well positioned – it has both the Industrial Internet technology and the deep expertise across healthcare, energy, transportation and aviation - to develop and deliver software and services capable of scaling and delivering meaningful insight and action from complex industrial data.”