GE will run 70 per cent of its workload in the cloud by 2020, says CIO Jim Fowler

Fowler tells Oracle CEO Mark Hurd that GE wants to become the world's best digital industrial company and that it needs the cloud to get there

General Electric (GE) will run 70 per cent of its workload in the cloud by 2020 as part of the biggest transformation in its 130 year history, according to its CIO Jim Fowler.

Fowler was speaking at Oracle's OpenWorld 2015 conference in San Francisco today, when he explained that his strategy was to make GE the world's best example of a digital industrial company.

He said that cloud computing will enable the firm to achieve this goal, as it will allow technology companies who were investing in their own data centres to provide the right services to GE, which will subsequently allow the American firm to invest in digital technologies instead.

By 2020, Fowler said that GE will have run $1bn of "industrial productivity" into the business, and should grow a $15bn digital business with digital products and services.

As cloud is a huge enabler of this, he believes that the company will have 70 per cent of its workload running in the cloud in five years' time.

Over the last 18 months, GE has moved 10 per cent more of its operations into the cloud; it has just over 20 per cent of its apps in the cloud today.

This has frequently allowed the firm to reduce costs - but that's not the only benefit, said Fowler.

He gave the example of using Oracle's human capital management (HCM) cloud application Taleo, which has helped the firm to take 10 million additional recruits.

"We believe we're able to take 10 million additional recruits through our recruiting system by moving into an app that [Oracle] is investing in. It's not differentiating us from the marketplace - we're not going to sell another jet engine because we've customised the tech of a recruiting system, but the way it's done is completely mobile and scalable," he said.

Fowler suggested that by moving to cloud applications, the firm would free up "a couple of thousand resources" which it could then use to differentiate the company from its competitors.

Asked by Oracle CEO Mark Hurd whether GE's CEO Jeff Immelt understood everything that Fowler wanted to do with IT, Fowler responded by stating that Immelt "absolutely gets it".

"I'm probably the luckiest CIO in the world - I have a CEO who sits in front of everyone and says this matters, and not only does he say it matters, he backs it up with goals and objectives," he said.