GE Predix Cloud To Satisfy Industrial Data Needs

American conglomerate General Electric has entered the cloud market with a solution designed to meet the unique requirements of industrial clients.

The industry titan, best known for making lightbulbs, trains, and power stations, has announced Predix Cloud, aimed at organisations operating in the aviation, energy, healthcare and transportation industries.

GE claims is the world’s first and only cloud solution designed specifically for industrial data and analytics.

Industrial Cloud

“This platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will capture and analyse the unique volume, velocity and variety of machine data within a highly secure, industrial-strength cloud environment,” the company said.

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

“A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare,” said Immelt. “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 customised solutions that will help transform their business.”

The cloud market is of course crowded with a number of different offerings, but GE says that its Predix Cloud differs from others because it provides advanced connectivity-as-a-service for industrial assets; scalability for machine data that consumer cloud services are not built to handle; and customised security solutions for industrial operators and developers.

It is also built to handle governance issues and reduce compliance costs, as well operate seamlessly with applications and services running in a broad spectrum of cloud environments. The Predix Cloud is based on a “gated community” model to ensure that tenants of the cloud belong to the industrial ecosystem, and it is offered with a on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing model.

“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, 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.”

A pretty bold claim then but apparently the Industrial Internet is generating data twice as quickly as any other sector, as infrastructure investment expected to top $60 trillion over the next 15 years.

And the advent of the Internet of Things means that the number of devices connected to the Internet will continue to swell. This in turn will generate a huge amount of industrial data, which GE is hoping to exploit.

GE’s Predix Cloud has been apparently purpose-built from the ground up, but it will also run on other cloud fabrics if required by a customer.

Predix Cloud uses Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry to help with application development, deployment and operations.

The service will be commercially available to customers in 2016.

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