GE Digital’s Industrial IoT Revival: Partnerships, Edge Innovation, and Closing the Transformation Gap

GE Digital is steering the company back from a turbulent 2017, leveraging strategic collaborations and cutting‑edge edge technology to drive industrial digital transformation.

Strategic Alliance with Microsoft

Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital, announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure that deepens integration between Microsoft’s cloud platform and GE’s Predix industrial IoT (IIoT) application. The collaboration focuses initially on oil & gas and mining sectors, aiming to predict equipment failures and cut operating costs.

Expanding Edge Capabilities

To address previous technical challenges, GE Digital launched a suite of edge solutions:

• Predix Edge Manager – supports up to 200,000 connected devices from a single console.
• Predix Machine – enables micro‑service based applications to run at the edge on customer‑owned virtualised data centres or server‑class hardware.
• Predix Complex Event Processing (CEP) – delivers low‑latency analytics for real‑time event processing.

These tools are expected to be available on the edge by Q1 2018 and will empower customers to transition from asset management to automation and insights‑driven machine learning across distributed systems. An example is EdgeLINC, a comprehensive edge‑to‑cloud solution for GE Transportation that integrates the new edge products with Asset Performance Management.

Reconciling Optimism with Readiness

GE’s Minds + Machines conference highlighted a widening gap between executives’ enthusiasm for IIoT and the pace of implementation. In a survey of IT and OT decision‑makers:

• 80% view IIoT as transformational.
• Only 8% say digital transformation is ingrained in their operations.
• 10% lack a digital transformation plan.

To measure progress, GE Digital introduced the Industrial Evolution Index, which currently scores 63/100. While the outlook score stands at 78.3, readiness lags at 55.2.

Bill Ruh stated, “A gap is emerging between outlook for the IIoT and actions. We are working to close that gap by partnering with customers to accelerate change.”

With these initiatives, GE Digital is positioning itself to turn its historical challenges into a platform for industrial innovation and growth.

Author: Jeremy Cowan – Editorial Director, IoT Now, IoT Now Transport, IoT Global Network, VanillaPlus.