Nikhil Chauhan, GE Digital | GE Innovation Day 2016
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2016-08-22

Nikhil Chauhan, Director of Product Marketing for Predix at 
GE Digital, sits down with host Jeff Frick at GE Digital Headquarters in San Ramon, California for a special On the Ground segment.

https://siliconangle.com/2016/08/24/ges-predix-designed-for-analytics-when-milliseconds-matter/

GE’s Predix: designed for analytics when milliseconds matter

There are a lot of cloud analytics platforms out there, but you’ve never seen one quite like GE Predix.

Optimized for the unique characteristics of industrial environments, with their multitudes of machines and processing needs, Predix is designed to support complex systems in which application logic goes where it’s needed. That may be in individual sensors, networks of sensors, controller nodes, gateways, on-premise servers, the cloud and any combination of the above.

No two industrial companies have identical needs, and that’s why Predix was designed to provide the ultimate in flexibility for Internet of things (IoT) environments. “It’s a complete edge-to-cloud platform,” said Nikhil Chauhan, director of product marketing for General Electric Co.’s Predix platform. Chauhan recently joined theCUBE’s Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) at GE Digital’s Innovation Day 2016 to describe the Predix architecture and what’s different about it (*Disclosure below).

In a nutshell, Predix is a “horizontal platform that provides the ability to run application logic where it makes most sense for business,” Chauhan said. Often that’s at the edge of the network, close to the source of data, where split-second decisions can have huge consequences.

For GE customers who operate equipment that travels at high rates of speed, such as locomotives and airplanes, “60% of the data that is collected loses value for analytics in just a few milliseconds,” Chauhan said. “You have to ensure that you have very short latency, and that is where edge computing can help.”

Other interviews in this series 

GE Predix chief architect sees IoT analytics as a game-changer

How GE Predix tackles the unique challenges of the industrial IoT

GE seeks to simplify the industrial IoT’s mind-blowing complexity

The cloud is most useful for large-scale analytics in environments and in which connectivity can be assumed, but that’s not always the case in industrial companies. Sensors may be located miles from the closest cellular data signal or intentionally kept off-line for regulatory or security purposes.

“You really need to have both edge and cloud in tandem,” Chauhan said. Service-level agreements and regulatory requirements often specify timeframes for gathering outputs and making decisions. Predix is designed to work backward from a defined goal to enable designers to place computing power where it makes the most sense in order to meet uptime, safety, compliance and other requirements.

It does so in party by enabling developers to manage what data to keep and what to discard at a fine level of detail. “A typical airplane probably collects 10 terabytes of data every 30 minutes,” Chauhan said. “You don’t need to transmit every single bit to the cloud. Or think of a locomotive engine sensing exogenous data and making decisions on when to push the brakes. You don’t have time to go to the cloud for that.”

iPod shuffleSmart sensors will increasingly be able to take on analytics tasks of their own. Frick drew an analogy to Apple’s iPod Shuffle (right), a low-end version of the music player that has no screen. Many people were baffled by Apple’s decision to leave out something that they considered to be an essential element at the time of the Shuffle’s introduction in 2005, but the intended usage scenario didn’t mandate it. In the same way, sensors can be imbued with smarts without having to become full-blown computers.

GE is actively courting developers to build an ecosystem around Predix, Chauhan said. “We need a village to support us.” The company intends to act as an integration point and single point of contact. “Customers have to make sense of the data that’s coming off of GE and non-GE equipment,” Chauhan said. “The point is to provide a standard, scalable software framework that can work across a variety of machines, whether from GE or others.”

Visit Predix.io to download the software development kits and begin your own industrial IoT journey.

* TheCUBE, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, was the paid media partner at GE Digital’s Innovation Day. Neither GE nor other participants have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

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