GE is at the forefront of creating the Industrial Internet of Things. Bill Ruh, SVP and chief digital officer at General Electric Co. (GE) and CEO at GE Digital, spoke with Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during GE Innovation Day about his vision for the technology, especially GE’s Predix cloud, and how GE attracts new talent.

“We’re connecting really important things, that’s the industrial world, and …. [taking] that data and [doing] things no one has ever done before with them,” Ruh said. “And now, with the Predix announcement in the cloud, we can do it at a speed and a scale globally that nobody could do before. So for us, the idea of people joining is they get to work on really big important machines, really big important problems, the next-generation technology. Who wouldn’t want to do that?”

Optimizing the cloud for the industrial world

GE’s scale is so enormous that even small-percentage improvements on efficiency create huge savings and have a big impact. If ira software can improve the efficiency of a wind farm by 5 percent, they can offer customers 20 percent more profit. Because GE deals with this scale on a regular basis, Ruh said the company is leveraging that experience for its industrial cloud offering in order to build on the accomplishments of the consumer world.

“We’ve looked at what everyone has done in the cloud, has been able to accomplish on the consumer side, and said we want that same speed and scale for the industrial world,” Ruh said. “The only thing we have to do is then add things like security in a different way. We have to think about different kinds of data, because they don’t deal with the same kind of large data we deal in healthcare, etc. So it’s optimized for industrial, but built with exactly the same concept of speed and scale that the consumer world has done so well.”

How does GE add value to the traditional cloud?

“One is connectivity. How you connect to big, important machines is very different than consumer devices … The second thing is we deal with data types, like take imaging in healthcare,” Ruh said. “Those are big, big images. So how do you deal with those images in real time in the cloud? We’ve dealt with that. Then we add in the idea of specialized analytics that are aimed at the ideas of zero unscheduled downtime, or how do you manage a fleet, and so on, at the cloud level.”

Ruh concluded: “So for us it’s really a platform capability in the cloud for industrial connectivity and building these analytic-based applications.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of GE Innovation Day 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE