GE opens app store for industry

The company said it was tapping into a $225 billon (£147 billion) market opportunity with the launch of its Predix.io cloud environment.

The Predix software is intended to work with plant maintenance systems the same way Apple’s IOS operating system does with mobile phones.

“Industrial companies need to become digital to survive.”

GE’s Jeff Immelt

This technology is known as ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS), and is a type of cloud-based software that can be used by both suppliers and consumers.

GE said it had created Predix to help its customers better manage their industrial equipment, much of which now requires connection to the internet for monitoring.

Most of the software applications GE makes will tie in with its own hardware, however, independent developers will also be able to deploy these.

Jeff Immelt, chairman and chief executive of GE, said while the internet had transformed consumer worth, industry had not yet seen its fair share.

Industrial productivity averaged 4% from 1990-2010 and has slowed to just 1% in the last five years, according to GE.

“Industrial companies need to become digital to survive,” said Immelt. “We must turn information into insights and insights into outcomes,” he said.

GE has already demonstrated some of the apps that can be used on the Predix platform.

One of these is Digital Power Plant, which can recommend ways of using equipment more efficiently by using sensors that have already been installed around power plants to analyse data.

Another app that works with Predix is Brilliant Factory, which offers GE’s digital manufacturing capabilities to other companies, to help them reduce unplanned downtime.

“Digital technologies and open source software have transformed the consumer space in radical ways, but industry has been slow to adopt these new innovations,” said Bill Ruh, chief digital officer of GE.

“Now is the time to capitalise on the extraordinary opportunity to transform the industrial landscape by leveraging Predix to collectively build apps, which will reveal exponentially greater value than what we have seen in the in consumer space,” he said.

GE is converging all software offerings on Predix, and its developer portal and a select number of apps will be available in late 2015, the company said.

The new software will offer ‘acceleration and transformation’ for industrial companies, with Predix currently on track to have 20,000 new developers next year, it said.

GE is attempting to reinvent itself as a digital industrial company to coincide with the launch of the Predix platform. To bolster its efforts, a television campaign called “What’s the Matter with Owen?” has been running on late-night comedy shows in the US. 

“GE is committed to lead as the industrial and digital worlds collide. We plan to generate outcomes alongside our customers,” said Immelt.