Good start - a platform for the Industrial Internet
We had the opportunity to attend GE' Digital first major customer conference 'Minds & Machines' at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
Take a peek at the video:
If you can't watch here are the key takeaways:
- At the core of GE's offering is Predix, a PaaS offering built on top of Pivotal CloudFoundry.
- GE Digital has built components on top of that, to make it easier for enterprises to build next gen applications on top of that.
- Deployment of Predix applications can be to public and private clouds.
- With the Predix Machine there is a lightweight component that can run 'close to the things' at the end points of an IoT network
- Showcases we saw were Intelligent Cities, Healthcare, Asset Management, Service with Planned Maintenance and many more.
- The showcase customer for Predix at the moment is Pitney Bowes, which monitors performance of their stamp print machines.
- A great showcase of the power of the overall GE was a location demo using GE LED lamps and standard smartphone / tablet camera sensor.
MyPOV
A good and splashy start by GE for GE Digital, the vendor spared little expense to convert Fort Mason into a very nice event space. GE attracted a who is who on the ecosystem side, that probably on very large vendors like GE can. Kudos for GE to share how it went from a Buy to Partner to Build strategy, which was probably not the fastest path, but that's where GE Digital is today. Growing the business to a 15B in 5 years will be a tall order for any software business. In my view GE Digital will only be able to achieve this with openness for 3rd party things (GE is open for that) and creating substantial attach rates of software to the things it sells. For enterprises that do business with GE, Predix is a IoT platform to take a closer look at. We will be watching.