Well, Industries being industries, generate large amounts of data during their operations, which becomes specifically hard to monitor and analyse. In a view to keep a track on this ever growing behemoth of data, General Electric (a.k.a.GE) has developed a cloud based service only for its industrial customers.
The cloud service, named Predix, an off-shot of its Predix machine data analytics software, will now be accessible to companies as a cloud service.
By the end of this year, GE hopes to migrate its software to the Predix cloud service. The service, however will become available to other customers only by next year.
Predix Cloud is built upon the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Platform – which is GE funded- and will help industries track any defects related to their complicated machinery and resolve the errors before any small malfunction leads to a major disaster.
GE has been painstainkingly building its Predix and Industrial internet business for the last 3 years, in hopes of becoming the sole industrial software solutions provider. The Predix cloud service will help the industries keep track of their data and applications, generated by jet engines, MRI scanners, power generation gears etc.
Earlier in July, oil and gas giant BP announced its plan to team up with GE to connect its 650 odd oil wells for a pilot project to test Predix platform.
The business of analysing big data from industries is not new. Splunk, founded in 2003 by Michael Baum, has been enabling industries to monitor and analyse machine generated data through a web-interface. GE, however with its brand image hopes that its service will gain a considerable advantage.
The company also wishes to connect more than 50 billion machines by 2020, and is looking to generate a revenue of $ 6 billion from software products by the end of this year.
The company is also investing a staggering sum of $ 500 million in its software product development anually.
The company had previously announced partnerships with leading software providers that includes Intel, Cisco, and Amazon Web Services.
Last year, GE generated more than $148 billion in revenue and is pinning on its industrial software business to bring in an additional $1 billion annually.
