An exciting new twist on the Internet of Things is poised to disrupt our lives in a much more profound way than commercial applications of Big Data. That was the premise of this week’s GE Industrial Internet conference in San Francisco, where General Electric unveiled a new analytics platform in collaboration with Pivotal, Amazon Web Services and Accenture. SiliconAngle Editor-in-Chief John Furrier, Wikibon founder Dave Vellante and analyst Jeff Kelly discussed the highlights of the event in a panel discussion on theCube.

The Industrial Internet is growing twice as fast as Big Data. In Jeff’s view, insights extracted from industrial data can empower companies across the healthcare, energy, and transportation sectors to serve citizens much more effectively than before. Wikibon predicts that this trend will generate half a trillion dollars in value by 2020, up from $23 billion today.

Jeff explains that the potential of the Industrial Internet stems from the fact that Big Data means different things for different organizations: while a retailer may leverage analytics to customize ads based on Twitter trends, a healthcare provider could utilize the same technology to deliver the right medicine for patients. Similarly, sensors that deliver real-time monitoring data can be used by IT departments to prevent application crashes or by airliners to save lives.

Dave changes the topic to GE’s product announcement. He offers more details about the initiative and shares his insights:

“This is big money and it’s big challenges. There’s some real headways here: there’s a real lack of data standards, these have to be developed and it takes a company like GE and it takes an ecosystem to allow those standards to emerge. It needs leadership, and GE [is] providing a billion dollar investment over a few years, it’s going up to a 1,000 engineers.”

Dave says that GE and other industry leaders such as IBM and Hitachi have the resources, engineering talent and culture of innovation needed to address the many challenges associated with the Industrial Internet. The lack of standards is at the very top of the list.

Jeff notes that this trend has a long way to go before interoperability becomes a reality. Furrier concurs, and highlights that the open-source TC/IP and HTTP protocols are what transformed the information highway of the 90s into the World Wide Web we know today. He believes that the open-source community will play an equally prominent role in the rise of the Industrial Internet.

Dave mentions that GE and EMC (one of Pivotal’s main backers) don’t have much of a track record in the open-source space, but notes that IBM didn’t have one either until a few years ago. He predicts that Pivotal will become a prominent open-source contributor within five years, and expects that Red Hat will secure a leadership position in the Hadoop market.

Click the video below for the full analysis.