General Electric Co. is updating its Predix application development platform for the industrial internet with new edge-to-cloud capabilities, enabling customers to make more precise decisions in real-time.

Launched in 2015, GE’s Predix is a platform as a service offering based on Pivotal Software Inc.’s Cloud Foundry software, tuned to the unique requirements of industrial applications. Those requirements include the need to process various kinds of data on different schedules and in different locations, with goals ranging from improving efficiency to predicting failure to optimizing logistics.

GE has been building out Predix’s capabilities ever since it launched the platform, adding new features designed to help customers fine-tune their industrial applications. Today, the company is announcing Predix’s biggest update yet, in order to accelerate computing at the network edge and optimize performance to deliver more accurate insights. In a raft of announcements, the company also rolled out new application development and analytics tools for Predix. And it said Predix will soon be available on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure public cloud platform.

The expansion of Predix’s edge capabilities is perhaps the most important news in light of research firm Gartner Inc.’s prediction that about 75 percent of all enterprise data will be created and processed outside data centers and the cloud by 2022. If that forecast proves to be correct, the ability to compute this data at the edge will become an essential requirement for any industrial firm that wants to optimize its business processes, GE said.

Predix’s new edge capabilities are intended to help to make this happen. The new technologies will allow companies with limited connectivity, latency issues and regulatory or security constraints to run analytics closer to the source of their data by deploying applications right at the network edge, GE said.

Among the new capabilities, Predix Edge now supports large fleets of up to 200,000 connected devices from a single console. Another new feature is Predix Machine, which enables microservices applications to run at the edge of customers virtualized data centers. Lastly, GE is introducing something called Predix Complex Event Processing, which enables data to be processed and analyzed at the edge, with extremely low latencies. GE’s new edge capabilities are set to become available in the first quarter of 2018.

GE also announced availability of new Operations Performance Management software for managing hardware assets such as pumps, valves and heat exchangers in industrial facilities. The OPM software is available now as a complement to its existing Asset Performance Management software. It works by analyzing historical and real-time data to improve the operational performance of those assets.

The company also launched new Field Service Management solutions powered by artificial intelligence that aim to improve customer experiences, plus new Advanced Application and Digital Twin Builder tools for developers that make it easier to build and scale their industrial applications.

As for Predix on Microsoft Azure, GE said this will be available by the fourth quarter of 2018 for North American customers before expanding globally in 2018. GE said the partnership is ideal for Predix users because they can use Azure to bring all of their systems and data into a shared environment, potentially improving performance, raising operational efficiency and other benefits typically associated with the cloud.

Image: Daisuke Matsumura/flickr