How are the benefits of the Industrial Internet and Internet of Things (IoT) playing out on the ground in basic utilities? Ganesh Bell, CDO and GM of software and analytics for GE Power, told Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during GE Innovation Day that it’s about meeting customer needs efficiently.

“In Power and Water, our mission is very simple,” he said. “It’s about providing every citizen on the planet with affordable, accessible, sustainable, reliable power and water.”

But this is a big problem involving a huge amount of infrastructure. GE has had to take a big-picture approach across the industry.

Solving big problems

“To solve the biggest problems in the world, you have to solve the whole problem,” Bell said. “And the whole problem now means hardware, software, services, the full customer solution. And that’s why we’re doing this thing called the Industrial Internet. Yes, it’s enabled by technologies like Internet of Things, Big Data, cloud, and everything, but it’s really about solving customer outcomes.”

Bell continued: “For us, in Power and Water, that means, how do you increase efficiency? And how do you actually produce more power, use less fuel, and optimize your operations?”

To be fair, companies have been collecting data to solve problems like this for decades. How are things different now? Bell offered the example of wind farms and turbines.

“We collect everything from vibration data, material temperature, external air weather data, but we’ve been collecting this data over a long time just for improving the machine’s performance from a design perspective,” Bell explained.

Where once they only collected data at 10-minute intervals, they can now collect it every 10 seconds or even every second. Instead of waiting for the next generation of turbines to take advantage of that data, “We’ve been collecting this data in real time and thinking about how we optimize the performance of the machine.”

GE’s PowerUp

This resulted in a product called PowerUp that GE released two years ago and has continued to develop. “Just through software, we could improve the performance of a wind farm or a wind turbine …. by 5 percent. That’s 5 percent more electricity from the same wind, all through software and data,” Bell said.

That is leading to more opportunities for GE software across a whole host of industries. “In the past, it was these machine-level problems,” he added. “Now customers have been asking us to solve enterprise, business-level problems.”

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