As GE CEO Jeff Immelt said in his opening remarks at today's Minds+Machines conference, "You went to bed last night as an industrial company, and you woke up today as a software and data analytics company. That's the reality of the sea change that's happening, and GE wants to be a partner in becoming you."
Immelt also announced that GE's Industrial Internet business pilots have paid off, with GE's 40 Industrial Internet applications generating more than $1 billion in incremental revenue for GE. From wind turbine monitoring to RailConnect360, the rail network's scheduling system.
Immelt then announced an important decision: that GE has decided to open up the Predix operating system to all businesses in 2015 to help companies in a wide range of industries create and develop their own Industrial Internet applications.Immelt said this will help foster an Industrial Internet application development ecosystem, and more application providers will spur a boom in innovation in this space.
From device to cloud, Predix is expected to become the de facto standard for the Industrial Internet
Immelt believes that Predix has the opportunity to become the operating system standard for the Industrial Internet, and that it can dramatically lower the barrier to adoption of Industrial Internet applications by enterprises.
Predix is a software platform responsible for interconnecting and connecting a wide range of industrial asset devices and suppliers to each other and to the cloud, as well as providing asset performance management (APM) and operations optimization services.GE's APM system monitors and analyzes 50 million pieces of data sent back from 10 million sensors on 1 trillion device assets every day***, with the ultimate goal of helping customers achieve 100% trouble-free operation.
As a successful example of GE's Industrial Internet application, AirAsia has deployed GE's Flight Efficency Services (FES). Immelt revealed that FES helps AirAsia optimize traffic flow management, flight sequence management, and flight path design, and that the FES system is expected to save AirAsia $10 million in fuel in 2014. help AirAsia save $10 million in fuel costs, while AirAsia expects to save as much as $30 million in fuel expenses by 2017.
European energy giant, Germany's Ion Group, has also deployed GE's industrial internet software platform, Wind PowerUp, to boost the output of its 283 wind turbines by 4 percent, producing an additional 40 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, enough to power 4,000 U.S. homes for a year.
To further promote the APM solution, GE also released the Predix App Factory for rapid development modeling, implementation and deployment of Industrial Internet applications.
Intel and Cisco enter the picture
Both Intel and Cisco are partners in GE's Industrial Internet strategy. Cisco and GE are working closely to enable Predix software to run on Cisco's networking products, and the first product to come out of the partnership is a Predix-enabled Cisco router with a hardened exterior to withstand the harsh environments of oil and gas facilities.
For its part, Intel helped GE develop a reference architecture for edge devices that integrates Intel's processors with Predix software to embed intelligent networking interfaces in any device. The two companies also plan to submit new designs to gateway manufacturers to enable new connected devices and sensor networks to natively support Predix.
On the network connectivity front, GE has also entered into a global alliance with SoftBank, Verizon, and Vodafone to optimize wireless network connectivity solutions for the industrial Internet.GE Seaside AT&T has partnered with AT&T to connect, via AT&T's network, trains, cargo ships and airplane engines into the cloud.