Tue, 11/15/2016 - 07:58

SAN FRANCISCO (Nov. 15, 2016)—At the Minds + Machines conference, GE announced new products, acquisitions and partner programs to enable further adoption of Predix, the operating system for the industrial internet. The platform enhancements, acquisitions and new independent software vendors (ISV) partner program further complement the Predix technology stack and make it easier for industrial companies to execute a strategic digital transformation to drive internal productivity, according to a statement from GE. In 2016, orders from GE’s portfolio of software solutions are on track to climb 25-plus percent to more than $7 billion, making GE the fastest growing digital industrial company in the world, according to the statement. Demonstrating the strength of Predix within GE, digital thread productivity will exceed $600 million, accelerating into 2017, the company said. “The opportunity for industry is now,” said Bill Ruh, chief digital officer of GE and CEO of GE Digital. “The Industrial Internet is profoundly transforming how we operate and our ability to deliver greater productivity for GE and for our customers. Connected machines, coupled with deep machine learning, are more powerful than anything we have seen. These strategic investments in both the Predix platform and our partners continue to attract industrial companies and provide them with tools they need to embark on their own digital industrial transformations.”

Growing Predix

More than 19,000 developers are building on Predix today, after GE opened the platform to global customers earlier this year. GE expects 20,000 developers working on the platform by year’s end. To service this growing segment of the ecosystem, as well as the hundreds of industrial businesses already using Predix, GE unveiled a new suite of software and applications designed to get Predix in the hands of operators, business analysts and other users in non-technical roles. This new release will focus on expanding the platform and scaling development of Digital Twins—virtual representations of the billions of physical assets that comprise the world’s industrial infrastructure—through Predix apps and toolkits. It also aims to grow the developer community by building better tools for software engineers within GE’s industrial customer base and extend the cloud to the edge—or to the machines. Today, GE unveiled the Predix System—software architecture and services designed to make any machine an intelligent asset and to bring visibility, control and analytic insights to every part of industrial infrastructure and operations. This new set of components can run on a variety of operating systems, devices and form factors—from sensors and controllers to gateways, server appliances and the cloud—making Predix a distributed system for the industrial internet and a complete “edge-to-cloud” offering.

Acquisitions

GE Digital announced it has acquired Bit Stew Systems to bring its data intelligence capabilities to Predix and other industrial solutions. Bit Stew applies its machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to automate the process of data modeling, mapping and ingestion, accelerating time to value for customers, such as BC Hydro, Pacific Gas & Electric and Scottish & Southern Energy. This acquisition will help GE Digital provide a solution to organize large amounts of data through efficient data organization at the edge or at the source of the data—the asset. GE Digital also acquired Wise.io, a leading machine learning and intelligent systems company. This acquisition will enable GE Digital to further accelerate development of advanced machine learning and data science offerings in the Predix platform. The Wise.io team deepens GE’s machine learning stack and will spearhead innovative solutions in GE’s vertical markets to develop its machine learning offerings. Current Wise.io customers include Pinterest, Twilio and Thumbtack.

ISV Partnerships

GE also announced a program dedicated to ISVs, aimed at spurring development of industrial solutions and extending the reach of the Predix platform. Through these partnerships, GE will share its industry expertise and allow partners to use Predix as the building block for new industrial applications to enhance various components of industrial operations—such as maintenance, content development and asset management. Ultimately, customers will have greater access to these new solutions and will more quickly see outcomes, enabled by the cloud.