GE Unveils Predix Cloud

The New York Times is reporting this morning that General Electric Co. will announce today its new Predix and Predix Cloud services to tie machines and other devices together, where the data collected can be analyzed to monitor performanceand supplies, and whether maintenance may be needed. The company is pitching Predix as an on-demand “cloud platform for the industrial internet”.

GE says Predix Cloud should play nicely with other cloud fabrics – for example, it can tap into Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry PaaS to help develop and deploy applications. “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”.

GE has a lot of making up to do in the cloud and analytics market and will be competing nearly directly with a number of companies that already have solutions in this space, such as IBM and Accenture. GE said this is the world’s first and only cloud solution designed specifically for industrial data and analytics. “That is exactly the same thing you want in the industrial world”.

“This could include end user analytics for customer service, data visualisation and real-time reporting for security, quality of service and predictive alerts for engineers through to the right tooling for developers”. But to do that, GE needs to refashion itself as one of the biggest players in IT, and no IT player is complete without a cloud to handle all of those applications and data.

Furthermore, given the sensitivity of information such as that coming from jet engines, GE hope that by keeping this data in-house, they will be able to offer a much more secure service rather than leaving it to a third-party. The company is partnering with Equinix Inc.to develop its data centers.

Splunk, which focuses on machine data with its Enterprise software in the commercial technology market, aims to optimise IT systems as well as being used for risk analysis. GE businesses are planning to migrate their software and analytics to the Predix cloud in the fourth quarter of this year.

More when compared to 50 b apparatus should be attached to the Internet by 2020, in accordance with GE.

The company is also investing a staggering sum of $ 500 million in its software product development anually. It is expected to be available to customers in 2016.