GE unveils the industrial internet operating system

GE has taken its analytics platform to the next stage by adding the availability of an operating system, which the company claims has been designed to run industrial machines.

Called Predix.io, the operating system allows third-party software engineers to build, deploy and scale industrial internet applications, according to GE.

GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh described the operating system as being “for industry to manage big machines to make them more productive”.

“We are building an open platform, where GE’s 14,000 developers can collaborate with our customers and partners to create new applications,” he added.

At the company’s annual Minds+Machine conference in Paris, GE CEO Jeff Immelt said: “Our approach is an industrial-strength platform.”

During his keynote presentation, Immelt discussed how industrial companies can use digital models of their machines, creating so-called “digital twins” of physical industrial assets.

He said that combining analytics fed in from sensors on machines in the real world with domain expertise will enable industrial companies to drive productivity.

GE does not expect all data collected from machines in the field to be fed up to the cloud. Instead, the machines will incorporate intelligent sensors that both gather and perform local analytics.

Ruh said the company’s strategy is to start with the machines, which he said are able to perform massive volumes of data-edge computing. This is where all data from a machine is collected into a data lake, and then statistical analytics is used locally to identify trends and anomalies.

“We use domain expertise to build an outcome,” explained Ruh.

In effect, these outcomes are coded as Predix.io enterprise applications, which are designed to improve operations, maintenance and efficency of a specific machine.

In the GE model, the cloud could be used for further data processing. “Machine learning in the cloud can be used to drive analytics,” said Immelt.