Through a partnership with Accenture, GE developed nine technology and service offerings that aim to assist organizations across several verticals to reduce technology overhead and streamline operations in the process. The company’s estimates that its new portfolio,  which is primarily targeted at airlines, railroads, hospitals, manufacturers and utilities, could save these companies up to $150 billion on an industry-wide scale.

GE put aside one billion dollars for this initiative, one of many that CEO Jeff Immelt architected to boost his firm’s margins  by 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent  in the next 12 months.

“Given the environment, some of the uncertainties, etc., services is an area that plays for the long term because of the…ongoing desire from customers for new levels of productivity,” said Steve Bolze, the chief executive officer of GE’s power and water business, who is also heading up the company’s services push.

GE’s new IT offerings are categorized based on their specific goals: optimizing networks, optimizing plants and facilities, optimizing assets and service quality and productivity.

GE Aviation’s Intelligent Operations services rely on sensory data from aircraft equipment to minimize maintenance related flight delays. Another offering leverages analytics software to stream real-time railroad data, while the Grid IQ SaaS offers energy companies on-demand admin capabilities that can be implemented twice as fast as any other solution.

The IT services market is a very lucrative one, and attracts not only Silicon Valley heavyweights but also vendors whose core business is not necessary related to this area. Large accounting firms are drifting in the same direction  and have already begun competing with traditional service providers, but some SPs retain their dominance in the market.  Accenture is among them, a fact that GE undoubtedly took into consideration.