General Electric Co. is looking to take its multibillion-dollar industrial software business in a new direction.

Reuters reported that the effort is being led by recently appointed Chief Executive Officer John Flannery, who took over the reins at the start of this month. Several executives who didn’t wish to be named told the news agency that the initiative could lead to wide-reaching changes in how the business, which is officially known as GE Digital, operates.

They said that among other things, Flannery is considering to restructure the group and increase the role of partners. Selling a minority stake in GE Digital is reportedly on the table as well. It’s all intended to boost the group’s sales growth, which has raised concerns on Wall Street.

According to Reuters, some investors and analysts fear that the business may fail to hit GE’s $12 billion annual revenue target for 2020. GE Digital is also facing mounting expenses that are expected to reach $2.1 billion this a year alone. Much of the capital will go toward building out Predix, the analytics system at the heart of GE’s software push.

The cloud-based platform can process sensory data from manufacturing equipment, wind turbines and almost everything in between to find ways of improving operations. Among the most promising use cases is predictive maintenance, which involves anticipating hardware issues based on historical data. But GE has struggled to implement its vision for Predix despite the heavy investments made so far.

The tipsters who revealed Flannery’s plan pointed to integration with other tools as a particular pain point. Specifically, they highlighted how the company sank a great deal of time into migrating its existing data processing algorithms to Predix. GE also had to add the assets obtained through a few recent acquisitions into the mix, fix bugs and sort out some logistical snags with the public clouds on which the platform runs.

These issues reportedly culminated in a two-month “time out” that the company called earlier this year to patch up Predix. According to the tipsters, GE is now narrowing its focus to streamline operations. They said that the company will concrete on driving the adoption of Predix among existing customers in its core markets, namely the energy, aviation and oil and gas sectors. 

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