As cloud utilization and data optimization continue to expand the possibilities for the Internet of Things, manufacturing companies are looking at each device they produce for ways to integrate data sensors and collection for the purpose of further improvement.

At the GE Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco, CA, David Bartlett, chief technology officer of Current by GE, joined Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the goals of GE spin-off Current, the new ways in which it’s approaching energy and lighting, and the usage of data in those fields.

More than light

As Bartlett explained it, GE’s role at Current is to concentrate efforts in distributed energy, “moving away from the centralized power to distributed or virtual power plants,” he said. The GE projects moved over to Current’s domain with this shift include solar renewable, energy storage and electrical vehicle charging, but also LED lighting, something into which Bartlett went in further depth.

While acknowledging simply saving energy was a large benefit of LEDs as people switched away from incandescent and fluorescent lights, Bartlett shared that its “LED fixtures now contain a digital driver that has a CPU, that has storage, that can house any number of sensors.” With these new capabilities, Current is looking to provide a platform for digitalization wherever those lights are used, with “the whole commercial and industrial space” as its market, he said.

Staying on while offline

The unification of these data features with traditionally low-tech environmental features is leading Current to seek other ways of merging separate services. “What we’re talking about here is bringing the IT world together with the OT [operational technology] world,” Bartlett stated, highlighting the differences between online and offline security, as well as their overlaps, as a much-needed but under-serviced section of the market.

At the same time, improving the efficiency of data handling is a crucial step in moving toward these new ideas. “It’s not just about putting firewalls up and securing; it’s also about ‘how do you collect data?’” Bartlett noted. “Just because we can collect it, doesn’t mean we should.”

Creating metadata at the edge without capturing personal information is one of the ways in which Current is trying to smooth and speed these processes, though Bartlett emphasized that it was investigating a number of other possible improvements as well.

“One of our mantras at Current is that we are open at the bottom, and we’re open at the top,” he said. “Open at the bottom means we’ll take data-feeds from any device, not just GE devices; open at the top means we’re servicing all that data through an API to application developers. … Now, having access to this additional data that we’re pulling in from this environment, [users] are able to greatly improve the accuracy of their applications and the value that they’re able to drive, even security.”

And while the range of opportunities yet to be examined is vast, Bartlett was optimistic about what was waiting to be discovered. “From a commercial-industrial point of view, there is so much opportunity,” he said. “In many ways, technology got us into a lot of these challenging situations over the past hundred years. But the great news is, there’s technology today that can get us out of it. There’s technology that can improve our efficiencies.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of GE Minds + Machines.

*Disclosure: GE and other companies sponsor some GE Minds + Machines segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither GE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Photo by SiliconANGLE