“Industrial Strength” – these two words are usually seen on cleaning products that can literally dissolve off the tips of your fingers.  With the Internet of Things and the Industrial Internet playing a huge role in our future, GE is bringing a new meaning to the term “industrial strength,” and the only danger to your fingers is the constant tap-tapping on a touch screen of your favorite connected device.

GE today announced a first-of-its-kind Big Data and analytics platform robust enough to manage the data produced by large-scale, industrial machines in the cloud.  In short, it’s an industrial-strength Big Data and analytics platform.

Industrial Strength Big Data

The platform is built to support the Industrial Internet, and turn Big Data into real-time insight. The platform will benefit major global industries including aviation, healthcare, energy production and distribution, transportation and manufacturing.  It is combined with the new GE Predictivity services and technologies available today, and will allow airlines, railroads, hospitals and utilities to manage and operate critical machines such as jet engines and gas turbines in the cloud – running businesses better by increasing productivity and reducing waste and downtime.

GE Predictivity Industrial Internet Solutions represents the most advanced software-based, cross-industry products designed to deliver secure access to industrial-grade decision support tools, automation, and expertise; and to optimize asset and operational outcomes.  These solutions include condition-based maintenance, outage management, fuel consumption, and controls and plant automation. The solutions are cloud-agnostic, enabling them to be deployed at the asset, facility or total fleet level on-premise at a customer site, in GE’s cloud, or in a trusted 3rd-party public cloud.

For example, GE’s new Flex Efficiency technology allows utilities to run advanced data modeling programs and simulations to optimize power output to meet fluctuating distribution demands. By doing this, customers can move the compute-intensive processing performed by machines into the cloud, thus saving time and money during varying conditional needs, such as a spike in the power grid due to falling temperatures.

This marks the first time industrial companies will have a common architecture, combining intelligent machines, sensors and advanced analytics.

“GE’s industrial strength platform is the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing.  The ability to bring machines to life with powerful software and sensors is a big advancement – but it is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data. This is what the Industrial Internet is about and we are building an ecosystem with partners to save money for our customers and unlock new value for society,” Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center, GE, said.

GE’s industrial strength platform is also supported by the new Proficy Historian HD – the first Hadoop-based historian data management software. Historian delivers real-time data management, analytics, and machine-to-operations connectivity in a secure, closed-loop architecture so critical global industries can move from a reactive to a predictive industrial operating model.