GE launches industrial IoT cloud service

By Business Cloud News

GE has launched a cloud service based on its industrial equipment monitoring and analytics platform, Predix, which it is aiming at industrial IoT applications in most of the verticals it already serves – aviation, manufacturing, automotive, energy and healthcare, reports BCN.

The cloud service will hoover up and analyse data generated by IoT sensors embedded in industrial equipment and can use the insights to optimise operations and proactively manage the equipment’s health by suggesting tailored maintenance regimes, whether an energy infrastructure asset or a jet engine.

While GE has offered these kinds of services for years this is the first time it has decided to offer them directly via the cloud to customers. The company is pitching Predix as an on-demand “cloud platform for the industrial internet.”

“Cloud computing has enabled incredible innovation across the consumer world. With Predix Cloud, GE is providing a new level of service and results across the industrial world,” said Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of GE.

“A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare. A more digital manufacturing plant means more products are made faster. A more digital oil company means better asset management and more productivity at every well. We look forward to partnering with our customers to develop customized solutions that will help transform their business,” he said.

The service includes a range of tools to help customers manage security, compliance and data governance, and GE claims that it can integrate seamless with other services running in on a broad range of cloud platforms.

“A cloud built exclusively to capture and analyse machine data will make unforeseen problems and missed opportunities increasingly a complication of the past,” said Harel Kodesh, vice president, general manager of Predix at GE Software. “GE’s Predix Cloud will unlock an industrial app economy that delivers more value to machines, fleets and factories – and enable a thriving developer community to collaborate and rapidly deploy industrial applications in a highly protected environment.”

The reveal comes less than a month after what was effectively a softer Predix launch. In July GE announced it is partnering with Pitney Bowes to develop a custom asset performance management (APM) application that analyses the data Pitney Bowes generates from its production mailing and shipping machines to improve the efficiency of its equipment. That partnership saw the companies adapt GE’s Predix software analytics platform to its mail handing and shipping environment.

Both companies have already partnered with one another elsewhere in the IoT ecosystem. Pitney Bowes and GE are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers formed last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.