Bill Ruh - GE Industrial Internet (2013) - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 18/06/2013

TheCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and John Furrier had a chat about the Industrial Internet with Bill Ruh, VP & Global Technology Director for GE, live at the GE Industrial Internet event in San Francisco.

Bill Ruh started by stating that GE sees this industrial internet movement being about “how we can deliver better outcomes and productivity games applying Big Data and the internet.”

For this event GE announced a couple of new products. For a while now they  worked around the idea of delivering an industrial internet platform, and their first announced product is the Enterprise Historian HD, which builds on Hadoop and pulls data off machines in real-time, allowing the users to analyze freely.

The second thing they announced was Predictivity.  Regarding Predictivity and working with the “Data Lakes”, Ruh believes that there’s going to be two kinds of analytics working on the streams coming in: identifying behaviors, making early warnings and adjustments for productivity. Using these service will be the closest thing to having a crystal ball, as predicting becomes a big part of the game, and it’s going to be very accurate. Accurate prediction will allow for changes that will eliminate a number of problems for businesses today.
GE playing up current strengths, partnering around infrastructure services & delivery

 

GE is focused on the outcome, understanding the game is too big to be tackled on your own. They have a series of capabilities such as knowledge in the domain and analytics, but they’ll eventually need others integrated into the system, delivering Infrastructure and the Platform as a Service. GE has partnered with Amazon Web Services to maximize the company’s data software and analytical offerings and with Accenture and Pivotal to develop new high-volume machine data management software, based on the Hadoop open-source framework. Ruh stresses that these are not exclusive partnerships, and that GE is going to expand its network of partners.

As for where is it all going, Ruh anticipates there are going to be a couple of waves: the first will be focused on establishing the ROI and selling the analytics outcome. That’s where we are today. The end game, the last phase, is where we’ll see the ability to buy power by the hour, and buy capabilities where the outcome is a guaranteed level of metrics.

For GE, Hadoop and analytics represent just the start — the first step in getting the data in order. But the next thing GE is getting “jazzed up” about is the machine-to-machine environment and the virtualization of the entire operation data center. For Ruh the Industrial Internet represents a network of interconnected machines with the ability to extract data and find meaning where it did not exist before.