GE has expanded its Industrial IoT platform Predix deeper into the electric utilities space, with a new suite of applications aimed at not only optimizing power producers' operations, but also deriving more profits from energy trading. Here's how GE's announcement explains the value proposition:
GE’s ‘Digital Utility’ solutions are designed to help electricity businesses navigate rapidly changing markets. Low demand growth, falling wholesale power prices, excess capacity from the growth of renewable energy sources, and long-term investments in thermal generation are greatly impacting power and utility businesses’ profitability.
For energy businesses ... remaining profitable means responding quickly to short-term trading opportunities, maximizing capacity for peak demand periods, and strategically planning to address long-term supply and demand trends.
GE’s Digital Utility software suite serves these needs, connecting data from electricity generation, distribution and transmission assets to enable more informed financial decision making.
The software suite uses more than 100,000 "digital twins"—software-based representations of physical assets—"to deliver insights about efficiency, capacity, emissions, flexibility, and availability that traders can use to bid with confidence in long-term, day-ahead, and short-term markets," GE added.
Specifically, the new applications include Business Optimization, for real-time communications between traders and operations; an updated Operations Optimization module for monitoring plant and fleet performance; a single dashboard system for health monitoring across traditional electric grids as well as renewable sources; new capabilities for field service technicians; Baseline Security Center, a new cybersecurity suite; and a new set of digital transformation services. (Full details are available at this link.)
Analysis: Predix Represents the Move Toward Systems of Engagement
Moving away from the gritty details, GE's latest Predix announcements symbolize a broader market trend, one that is important to understand.
"The market is seeing the leaders fusing IoT with AI to create real digital businesses," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "But the question is not the direction that the technology and market is taking, it is who are those leaders? It is no longer possible to use current, or one should say older definitions and market positions, as those vying for a leading place are coming as much from industrial technology as from information technology."
GE clearly is constantly repositioning its capabilities, just as entrenched enterprise IT players such as IBM and SAP are moving to also transform their markets and positions, Mulholland adds. "Is there a recognisably strategy under lying this? Thee answer lies not just in the more nebulous concept of the digital enterprise but in the development of intelligent systems of engagement models to bring competitive advantage and compliment the IT systems of record investments."
(Go here to read Mulholland's in-depth report on GE's most recent Mind and Machines conference, its annual showcase for industrial IoT.)
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