While most industrial markets enjoy relative stability and can depend on the normal indicators to drive business, the oil and gas industry is not so lucky. A unique set of challenges combined with inhospitable environments and shaky economics makes managing profitability in this sector tricky. In response, GE’s Predix industrial operating platform is tempering many of these problems by giving companies the tools they need to manage these issues in real time.

Matthias Heilmann, chief digital officer of GE Oil & Gas, spoke to Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during GE Predix Transform 2016 being held at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the role Predix is playing in creating efficiency within the highly volatile oil and gas industry.

Minimizing impact from market fluctuation

The oil and gas industry is one of the most volatile markets in the world. Supply access, international discord and competition from other energy sources all combines to play chaos with oil prices, which in the past year alone have swung from a high of $100 per barrel down to $26, and have now recovered back to $40.

For the companies in this industry to remain profitable, they must be highly flexible and extremely responsive to these market fluctuations. The Predix platform is helping them minimize the impact from fluctuations by giving them unprecedented control over these factors and allowing them to tune and retune their output, as needed, in real time.

“For our customers, for our industry overall, one of the key drivers is to be flexible, nimble and very fast in the way you ramp down and ramp up your capacity,” explained Heilmann. “Because the worst thing that can happen is you slim down, tighten the belt, but then once a recovery comes you’re not ready to execute.”

Connectivity is essential to oil and gas

From African jungles to miles beneath the ocean, the oil and gas industry works in the harshest environments on earth. The equipment they use, from the standard sensors on pipelines to the network connecting them and the compute and storage power behind it, must be absolutely reliable. GE is working with its customers to ensure that its Predix implementation not only working and robust, but also highly secure.

“We are in the roughest places in the world,” said Heilmann. “These are areas where you need to think about connectivity, and that’s where we establish with our partners connectivity environments to be able to service our customers.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the GE Predix Transform 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE