In only its very first year, General Electric’s (GE’s) Predix Transform 2016 conference seems to be the place to be for anyone in the software development community interested in becoming part of the company’s burgeoning Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Predix platform.

Gene Kim, coauthor of The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, sat down with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at GE Predix Transform 2016 at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Frick talked with Kim about how DevOps and the mobilization of developers is fundamental to GE’s rapidly growing IIoT community.

Predix brings together diverse software backgrounds

Many of the skillsets GE is bringing into the industrial sector of its business would seem more at home in a classic software company. Experts in everything from VMware to CyBase to SAP are all being put to work developing the company’s Predix platform, and the atmosphere around the project is being described as exhilarating.

“I think it’s just amazing to see that so many of these tools and techniques that we’ve dealt with in the software space are now being used in the most capital-intensive part of the business,” said Kim. “It’s a delight to see.”

Developers flock to Predix and IIoT

While many conferences are desperate to attract developers, the Predix Transform conference has attracted 1,700 developers from across virtually all areas of the software spectrum who are interested in becoming part of the Predix community. They see the Predix platform and IIoT as prime territory for developers and DevOps engineers, because the bulk of economic activity is already occurring in this sector and the IIoT will be so important to this already-massive sector that their roles here will be considered indispensable.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the productivity that things like this will create will elevate every Dev and Ops engineer so that they are going to be as productive as if they were at a Google, Amazon or Netflix,” said Kim. “We’re talking about trillions of dollars of annual economic value.”

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