GE launches industrial Internet PaaS

GE took its industrial Internet platform to the cloud today with the announcement of Predix Cloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering designed specifically for industrial data and analytics.

“Cloud computing has enabled incredible innovation across the consumer world. With Predix Cloud, GE is providing a new level of service and results across the industrial world,” GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt said in a statement Wednesday. “A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare. 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.”

Predix Cloud combines GE’s deep domain expertise in IT and operational technology. It will provide features including the following:

• Asset connectivity. Predix Cloud provides advanced connectivity-as-a-service for industrial assets, combining proprietary technologies with global telecommunications partners to enable rapid provisioning of sensors, gateways and software-defined machines.
• Scalability for machine data. Predix Cloud was purpose-built to store, analyze, and manage machine data in real time. From capturing and analyzing time series data from a locomotive with thousands of sensors to delivering large object data like a 3D MRI image to a doctor for diagnosis, Predix Cloud is built for the variety, volume, and velocity of industrial data.
• Security and compliance. Incorporating GE’s decades of experience in operational security and information security, GE says Predix Cloud is designed with the most advanced security protocols available, including customized, adaptive security solutions for industrial operators and developers.
• Governance. Leveraging GE’s global network and deep expertise across more than 60 regulatory areas, Predix Cloud is designed to streamline governance and drive down compliance costs for each individual user, while respecting national data sovereignty regulations globally. This enables GE, partners, and developers to more easily build and deploy services for highly regulated industries such as aviation, energy, healthcare and transportation.
• Interoperability. Predix Cloud will operate seamlessly with applications and services running in a broad spectrum of cloud environments, allowing businesses to take advantage of its optimized security and data structure offerings while maintaining and interoperating within existing solutions.
• Gated community. Predix Cloud is based on a “gated community” model to ensure that tenants of the cloud belong to the industrial ecosystem.
• Developer insight. Developers will have visibility into their operating environments and every actor connected to it. This will allow businesses to deploy and monitor machine apps anywhere, continuously adjusting to new demands in the physical and digital world while providing the security and visibility required for operational effectiveness.
• On-demand availability. Businesses will be able to access and scale with the Predix Cloud, which will be offered through an on-demand, pay-as-you-go pricing model.

GE businesses will begin migrating their own software and analytics to the PaaS in the fourth quarter of this year. The company will make the service commercially available to customers and other industrial businesses in 2016.

“A cloud built exclusively to capture and analyze machine data will make unforeseen problems and missed opportunities increasingly a complication of the past,” Harel Kodesh, vice present and general manager of Predix at GE Software, said in a statement Wednesday. “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.”

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