The Internet of Things (IoT) and the Industrial Internet that underlies it are two of the hottest topics in the tech world at the moment.  Some argue that the two terms pertain to similar things, while others state that the two are about different things that coincide.

As SiliconANGLE’s Mike Wheatley pointed out in his article, the Industrial Internet refers to the connectivity of things, while IoT is about making sense of these connections by merging the physical and the digital world.  Simply put, the IoT will be the ultimate embodiment of the digital world that the Industrial Internet creates.

And because the Industrial Internet is NOW, big companies are making heavy investments into it, and none more so than GE.

According to GE, machine connectivity, or M2M, is the backbone of Industrial Internet. It offers solutions to the problems that arise from having vast computer networks in numerous industries by using a familiar set of communication protocols that essentially allow machines to “talk” to one another. By enabling machine-to-machine communication, the Industrial Internet provides the following benefits for industry:

• Analyze industrial big data for actionable information
• Run operations from anywhere, on any device
• Engage and collaborate in cloud communities to solve business problems together
• Increase speed and accuracy of intelligence
• Capture and transfer knowledge easily between your people, systems, and sites

To make this happen, GE has a team of engineers who are using software to bring more value to its technology platforms to build the Industrial Internet.

“Industrial Internet is taking place through the convergence of the global industrial system with the power of advanced computing, analytics, low-cost sensing and new levels of connectivity permitted by the Internet,” GE Chairman of the Board and CEO, Jeff Immelt, said in his keynote.

Immelt believes that Industrial Internet will be able to deliver greater speed and efficiency to industries as diverse as aviation, rail transportation, power generation, oil and gas development, and health care delivery. For example, in health care, GE plans to achieve this through the development of an “intelligent” system using robots, computer vision and automatic identification technologies like RFID tags to fetch, sort, and sterilize surgical tools that would ultimately save lives and money.  Surgical staff are at risk from handling contaminated surgical tools used to treat sick patients, and handling these unsterilised tools could be fatal.  By creating a system that would eliminate this risk, lives could be saved.

GE’s efforts in Industrial Internet have been turbo-charged by its $105 million investment in Pivotal, the combination of EMC assets such as the Greenplum division and Pivotal labs, as well as other VMware products.  Pivotal will speed up the development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet.

This investment has also helped GE to emerge as the main competitor to IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative, which aims to help governments and companies better understand and analyze the voluminous data coming from connected devices and industrial equipment to improve operations and deliver better services to citizens and customers.