GE Finds New Partners to Drive Industrial Internet 

At this week’s Minds+Machines summit in Chicago, General Electric (GE) announced 14 new predictives tools that will sit atop the Web-connected machines making up the Industrial Internet. Although networks sensor-laden machines have has already made a home for themselves in some of GE’s manufacturing facilities, the new software additions are expected to give a number of other sectors a technological leg up.

To further secure its place at the forefront of the Industrial Internet push, the conglomerate also announced new partnerships with AT&T, Cisco, and Intel, all of which will help to build a greater ecosystem around GE’s machinery management platform.

With the new technologies coming to the platform, called Perdix, GE now has 24 tools to help optimize manufacturing assets and operations for a number of industries. Among them are the HoF SimSuite cloud service for healthcare providers and the Field360 oil field monitoring tool for oil and gas.

On Tuesday, the company’s chief economist and head of analytics published a paper arguing that the Industrial Internet can help companies save billions of dollars annually. Now, GE officials say that Perdix can help make this possible today by directly addressing bottlenecks created by legacy systems in place today.

“Our greatest challenge and opportunity is to manage and analyze this data in a highly secure way to deliver better outcomes for customers and society,” said GE chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt during his keynote at the Mind+Machines summit. “We are developing more predictive solutions and equipping our products with sensors that constantly measure performance so our customers see major productivity gains and minimize unplanned downtime. Observing, predicting and changing this performance is how the Industrial Internet will help airlines, railroads and power plants operate at peak efficiency.” Watch the rest of Immelt’s keynote below.

Already, the company announced that one of its Industrial Internet tools, PowerUp, can boost wind turbine technology by up to five percent, bringing a profit about 20 percent to each wind turbine on a farm.

Meanwhile, the addition of new partners is expected to deliver remote maintenance tools, add support for open standards and make machine data more easily accessible. The collaborative efforts will build off of existing alliances between Accenture, Amazon Web Services and Pivotal.