Looking to capitalize on the launch of its new “Predictivity” Big Data and analytics platform for the Industrial Internet, GE has outlined a number of expanded partnerships with companies at the cutting edge of Big Data, including Accenture, Pivotal and Amazon Web Services. By leveraging these new partnerships, GE aims to position itself as a leading player in an industry that’s expected to be worth around $1.2 trillion by 2020, according to a new professional alert from Wikibon.

In what amounts to GE’s blueprint of the Industrial Internet’s future, the company said that it plans to continue the advancement of the industry by integrating services and developing software, analytics, and cloud-based capabilities alongside its partners to serve diverse functions for industry.

Crucial to this will be GE’s new global strategic alliance with Accenture, an initiative aimed at developing leading technology and analytics applications to help companies across industries take advantage of the massive amounts of industrial strength big data that is generated through their business operations. This alliance builds on the original aviation joint venture Taleris, which was announced in 2012, as a solution to provide airlines with technology that predicts likely failures of aircraft parts and systems and recommends preventive action.

GE has also revealed more about the goals of its relationship with Pivotal, the EMC/VMware spinout that it recently invested $105 million into back in April. GE’s investment in Pivotal was seen a big deal, as Wikibon’s chief analyst Dave Vellante observed at the time:

“The combination of GE, and now EMC and VMware and Pivotal, essentially brings another big player to the Smarter Planet world.”

“I think the significance is, in my view, the new wave of Big Data applications, everybody talks about the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet, this is now upon us and we’re seeing a real example of collaboration to drive that forward.”

Now, GE has shed more light on how its close relationship with Pivotal will speed up the development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet. The partnership aims to jointly develop and deploy Industrial Internet solutions by leveraging Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry, in-memory and Hadoop-based technology, and supporting GE’s strategy of bringing consumer-grade capabilities to the enterprise.

Pivotal’s CEO Paul Maritz spoke of a “common vision” shared by his company and GE that encompasses “common architecture, cloud-agnostic platform based on modern, scale-out technologies”:

“Our respective strengths in big data analytics and industrial software will provide our mutual customers with the solutions they need to become an Industrial Internet company and begin building or deploying applications that make them more efficient year after year.”

Finally, GE has forged what it calls a “strategic alliance” between itself and the world’s leading cloud computing provider, Amazon Web Services. As part of this alliance, AWS will become the first cloud computing provider to deploy its new Predictivity Industrial Internet platform. GE stated that the plan is to leverage AWS’s powerful, scalable, low-cost platform to offer its customers cloud solutions for industrial applications and infrastructure.

Werner Vogels, Amazon.com CTO, offered a short statement outlining the motivations behind the new alliance:

“Decades of GE-led innovation have helped shape history, and we are excited to partner with the GE team to help shape the future of Industrial Big Data by helping GE bring together intelligent machines, advanced analytics and industrial applications using the AWS cloud.”

“GE’s domain knowledge and R&D capabilities combined with the strength of our global infrastructure, operational excellence and breadth of services will enable customers to solve problems in ways we haven’t even imagined yet, such as improved accuracy in healthcare treatments or extreme levels of energy efficiency.”

GE Chases Industrial Big Data’s Big Pot of Gold

GE’s Predictivity platform is the first solution that can truly manage industrial-sized Big Data, which is far more complex than other types of new and emerging content and information available today. According to the Defining and Sizing the Industrial Internet report issued today by The Wikibon Project, industries have been slower than enterprises to take advantage of cloud environments because industrial Big Data has unique requirements and managing this complex data requires enormous computing power.

The Wikibon report stated that there are a number of factors that will affect the adoption of cloud environments in the enterprise, such as:

• Unprecedented Growth of Machine Data: Industrial data will grow at two times the rate of any other Big Data segment within the next ten years. Intensive machine-based software and services – including capturing sensor data, performing local processes and industrial analytics in real-time, and distributing data to end points – are required to deal with this massive growth in Industrial high-data output. Wikibon estimates that the total Industrial Internet Technology Spend will reach $514 billion by 2020.

• Velocity: Instant analysis of huge amounts of incoming raw data at millisecond speed, as well as the flexibility to interact with and compare to other existing industrial data streams, is critical to the real-time decision making required to make this data actionable and drive positive outcomes.
• Value: By 2020, the total Industrial Internet Value Creation will reach $1.279 trillion. This represents the improvement in efficiency, productivity and other associated benefits that result from exploiting Industrial Internet technologies.

Jeff Kelly, Big Data Analyst at The Wikibon Project, offered the following observation on GE’s Industrial Internet strategy in light of these findings:

“Our research found that an industrial strength cloud environment needs to meet the challenges of integrating large volumes of machine data with data from other sources while executing near real-time analytics. GE is well positioned – it has both the Industrial Internet technology and the deep expertise across healthcare, energy, transportation and aviation – to develop and deliver software and services capable of scaling and delivering meaningful insight and action from complex industrial data,”

GE’s industrial strength Big Data and analytics platform is the culmination of the work done by its team of engineers to develop software that adds more value to its technology platforms to build the Industrial Internet.