
General Electric Expands Predix Cloud For Industrial Customers
General Electric (GE) announced on Wednesday that the company plans to expand the cloud service particularly for heavy industries on the Internet of Things.
Heavy industries targeted are energy, transportation, healthcare or aviation. The Predix platform is the basis for the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that GE is pitching for industrial data and specific analytics.
The PaaS or IaaS market for the Internet of Things already counts a number of contenders. What GE looks at is to enable industry representative to develop specific apps that make use of the real-time data in the decision-making process.
Specific technology for the Predix Cloud platform has already been licensed in December by Japanese company SoftBank to develop apps for sectors joining the PaaS market, such as manufacturing or shipping.
Amazon and Microsoft, with Web Services and Azure respectively are offering services targeting data collection and analysis from devices, gadgets, smart home appliances and other destined for consumers.
Based on the same sensor technology, Predix Cloud expanded for industrial sectors would be collecting and managing data from hospital equipment, wind turbines or jet engines for instance.
Certainly, as a cloud based service, rightfully voiced concerns having been addressing the issue of security. General Electric stated that taking into account the high sensitivity of the industrial applications that it prepares for Predix Cloud, advanced security protocols have been set in place.
General Electric also announced that the cloud service would hit the market starting 2016. As it aims to join what it titled the industrial Internet, GE developed Predix cloud as a gated community where limiting tenants to just industrial customers.
Until 2016, General Electric is working on shifting analytics and software to Predix cloud. The strategy to join the Internet of Things market was developed as a step by step approach.
In 2013, General Electric purchased 10 percent stake in Pivotal for 105 million dollars.
Pivotal’s technology is key to General Electrical for cloud architecture, as well as data analytics services that the company aims to introduce to the industrial community.
Photo Credits: Vimeo.com