General Electric goes to the cloud with enough tech to handle big data from jet engines

The world's oldest power company turns big data software vendor

General Electric, the world's fourth largest company, has announced plans to embrace the cloud and big data with its Predix Cloud product.

The venerable energy firm, formed in 1892 after a merger between Thomas Edison's Edison General Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, now produces over 30 per cent of the world's power.

But as Bill Ruh, GE's VP of global software services told Computing earlier this year, power production in 2015 is also "about getting better outcomes out of the machines [GE] produces".

"The most profitable thing we can get to is zero unscheduled downtime," he said.

The Predix Cloud will attempt to keep tabs on data created by jet engines, MRI scanners, power generation technology and other high-end, large pieces of machinery.

GE's pitch also extends to the Internet of Things (IoT), the firm said in a statement:

"Some of these 'things' are modern, while others might still need to be digitised. Predix can securely connect with multiple machines, old and new, from different vendors on very large industrial scales using a heterogeneous mix of data and communication protocols to aggregate data from these services."

Ruh told Computing that aircraft jet engines now produce terabytes of data per flight.

"On average an airline is doing anywhere from five to 10 flights a day, so that's five to 10 terabytes per plane, so when you're talking about 20,000 planes in the air you're talking about an enormous amount of data per day," he said.

Predix Cloud comes from GE's $105m stake in custom applications, data and analytics firm Pivotal - which is in itself a joint venture between EMC and VMware.

It is being offered as a platform-as-as-service (PaaS) model running on AWS, but can also be deployed physically in Predix data centres, or with other internal infrastructure for customers.

Harel Kodesh, vice president and general manager of GE Software's Predix Group, said this makes the product "completely different from all the consumer and IT clouds," although did little to explain why.

GE has been talking for several years about the big data and IoT opportunities it sees, and reckons global GDP could be boosted by up to $15tr within 20 years as a result of these technologies.

If enough customers follow up on GE's plans, a sizeable amount of that, it seems, could belong to GE.

Thomas Edison - who is said to have smeared colleague-turned-rival Nikola Tesla to prevent the latter introducing a free energy source for the entire planet via the ionosphere, not to mention kickstarting the rise of Hollywood by hiring thugs to violently disrupt filmmaking projects that hadn't paid his patent licence fees - would probably be proud of this promising new profit-making venture by the company he founded.