General Electric Co. already announced one major acquisition earlier this week with its impressive $915 million buy of ServiceMax Inc., and now the 124-year-old company has announced not one but two other purchase with its acquisition of machine learning startup Wise.io and data intelligence company Bit Stew Systems.
Wise.io specializes in predictive intelligence, which uses machine learning to anticipate upcoming events. The startup’s technology was initially used by astrophysicists to better understand rare stellar phenomena, but today Wise.io’s platform is used primarily for predicting and dealing with customer support issues. Wise.io’s algorithms anticipate high support request volume and smartly distributes tickets to deal with issues proactively.
According to GE, Wise.io’s technology will be folded into Predix, GE’s cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service that is used for industrial analytics and asset performance management. GE Chief Information Officer says that Wise.io’s machine learning technology will provide an enormous boost to GE’s own work in artificial intelligence for Predix.
Meanwhile, GE’s other acquisition, Bit Stew, provides a data intelligence platform powered by machine learning, which integrates data between industrial connected devices and external systems. Like Wise.io, Bit Stew’s platform will also be funneled into Predix.
“We are pleased to welcome Bit Stew to the GE Digital family. The integration of our technologies will provide the Predix platform with a greater capability to integrate data while it is in motion from the edge to the cloud,” said Harel Kodesh, CTO at GE Digital. “This combination will help us to accelerate our industrial offerings, providing customers with contextual understanding of their assets and operations.”
GE did not reveal how much it paid for Wise.io or Bit Stew, but the Vancouver Sun reported that the acquisition price for Bit Stew was over $207 million. Combined with the recent $915 million it paid for ServiceMax, this shows that GE is serious about beefing up Predix and making it the go-to PaaS for industrial applications.
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