TheCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante discussed the Industrial Internet trends with Beth Comstock, CMO GE, live at the GE Industrial Internet event, Innovation Day, in San Francisco.

GE has a 130-year history of building machines, and now these machines just happen to be smarter, dealing with more and more data, information which has increasing value for their customers. Big Data means a large volume of information originating from business operations and various logs, which is increasingly more difficult to analyze with traditional tools.

“Customers want more than just reliability from the machines, they want the ability to take the machine data and run their business better”, explains Comstock. The technology and the engineering capabilities evolve, which in turn generates a lot of “it-would-be-great-if-we-could…” feedback from the GE customers. This way GE can identify the need, and pair it up with the capability.

Building a model for data-driven business

Data-driven business trends impacted GE in the way that they needed to identify the means to reap the data from the machines, figuring out which data was valuable and then delivering it to the customer. Identifying valuable data allows to exchange it for money and thus make profit.

“The ability to take the data and do more with it creates new business models”, says Comstock. For instance, talking about these new business models applied to the aviation industry, Beth Comstock explains it’s not enough to know when a certain engine is about to break down, it’s imperative to know when to come for repairs. Besides selling an engine, the service of “no unplanned downtime” is also included in the offer.

• Are smarter machines eliminating IT jobs?

Vellante wanted to talk about the hyper-automation and some IT professionals’ reluctancy to embrace it, out of the fear of being rendered obsolete. Beth Comstock’s response highlighted the understanding GE has for Deep Expertise. The company believes that people and machine expertise go hand in hand. Anyone can do automation and building software applications, but insight knowledge in a certain industry, the people factor, is critical. Beth doesn’t believe people are being left out in this equation, on the contrary, they are empowered.  The knowledge combination between the people and the machine is crucial, leading to predictability.

What if another competitor launches their industrial internet?

The industrial internet is just space, believes Comstock. The internet of (really big) things is coming online, prompting the need to understand it. GE is not naive to think it’s going to be the only player around, but they are certain of their unique capabilities and their ability to move fast. A couple of months ago GE launched a Data Science challenge, teaming up with a Silicon Valley start-up called Kaggle to harness the power of data science from scientists around the world. Using this platform for data prediction competitions, GE was able to partner up with scientists with no background in the aviation industry, who helped them shave off an incredible amount of time and fuel, and who managed to land a plane in a faster, better, cheaper manner.

The core mission at GE, apart from building better machines, is now partnership. GE announced its new Predictivity platform, and its partnership with Amazon Web Services, Pivotal and Accenture. “It’s all about partnerships”, vouches Comstock. “As complicated as these issues are, there’s no one here who can solve them alone.”