GE Adds Infrastructure Services To Internet Of Things Platform.
Big data centers, powered by tech giants such as Amazon and IBM, already store everything from music to photos to your employee’s backed up quarterly reports. NEW YORK, Aug 05, 2015 (BUSINESS WIRE) — As a digital industrial company focused on answering the unique needs and scale of customers across aviation, energy, healthcare and transportation, GE has announced plans to enter the cloud services market with Predix Cloud. But now GE says that the industrial sector needs its own designated cloud to hold, clean, and analyze the plethora of data it’s producing each year.
Last month Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles after WIRED reported a security vulnerability that allowed hackers to take remote control of someone else’s Jeep. The service, based on its Predix operating system, will include security and regulatory compliance tools. “You just look at the consumer world, you get jealous at the speed at which you can easily and quickly gain access to applications,” Bill Ruh, vice president of GE software, told Reuters. “That is exactly the same thing you want in the industrial world.
Predix Cloud will drive the next phase of growth for the Industrial Internet and enable developers to rapidly create, deploy and manage applications and services for industry. The thing is you need it done in an industrial way.” The company expects 50 billion machines to be connected to the Internet by 2020, according to Reuters. It needs to be cleaned, normalized, compressed and ingested in a secure and efficient manner.” “The nature of the devices we’re dealing with is very different from tablets or smartphones,” he added. “They are often considered part of the critical infrastructure.” Using the GE cloud, company representatives say that big industries that rely on heavy equipment, such as airlines, hospitals, and oil companies, will be able to capture and analyze big data from a variety of sources, giving them insights into the performance of their equipment and the external factors affecting it. Predix was originally created as a Platform as a Service to allow customers and third-party developers to build applications to take advantage of all the data coming from those sensors.
App developers will also be granted access to some of the data, a move that will allow them to design apps that manufacturers can purchase directly for their work. “The move highlights how important the so-called Internet of Things, a term for matching sensors with cloud-computing systems, has become for some of the world’s biggest companies,” wrote Quentin Hardy for the New York Times. GE is expected to rake in around $6 billion from software this year, much of which comes from its software Predix, which the company used to build the new cloud. IBM bought Softlayer in 2013, then launched the Bluemix development platform the following year with the hope that developers will create applications on Bluemix and run them on Softlayer.
Unlike Amazon’s AWS service, which is open to everyone from large companies to individual users, GE is specifically targeting the industrial market—think connected jet engines, medical equipment, and mail-sorting machines. Hackers hired by governments to find and take sensitive intelligence information are launching attacks against mobile applications and operating systems as they look for new ways to infiltrate networks, Greg Kesner, the former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s data intercept program, tells CIO Journal. “The mobile phone industry is certainly being attacked more heavily now in the U.S. environment,” he said. Managing mobile security has become more complicated for CIOs and security chiefs amid rising threats and the increasing risk that mobile users increasingly can pick up malware via unsecured wireless networks. Moreover, GE has a more keen understanding than other companies of how industrial machinery operates, company representatives insist, a fact that allows it to predict the impact certain data sets will have on its customers’ equipment.
Deborah Butler, Norfolk Southern Corp.’s executive vice president for planning and CIO since 200, plans to retire in October after more than 35 years at the railroad. Kodesh said that the Predix platform generated $4 billion in software revenue last year, and the company sees additional revenue opportunities with the infrastructure offering. General Electric calls its new product Predix Cloud, the latest addition to of a set of Predix developer tools, originally designed to work only with with GE equipment but later opened up to all connected gear.
He was careful not to criticize other IaaS vendors, but simply pointed out that they are typically designed for consumers or for general IT requirements. The service is not just a place to run applications, but a platform that includes tools for quickly and easily building applications that integrate with IoT devices. She also oversaw progress installing advanced signaling technology aimed at preventing collisions and derailments, negotiated the purchase of 282 miles of rail lines and founded an employee resource group. Instead of waiting for someone to report that a machine is broken, the app will generate service requests based on data from the machines themselves—including information about what’s wrong and how to fix it.
GE businesses will begin migrating their software and analytics to the Predix Cloud in Q4 2015, and the service will be commercially available to customers and other industrial businesses for managing data and applications on Predix Cloud in 2016. The cloud-computing services from the likes of Amazon.com Inc., Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have the same worries as their customers: reliability and security, the WSJ’s Robert McMillan reports.
It’s not the only software platform designed to help you build apps based on streams of machine data, but GE hopes that its tight focus on security and industry-specific features will set it apart from the pack. These top cloud providers use their own cloud services for certain functions, but continue to keep others on private servers. “The CIO at any of these companies is not going to be rewarded if they took a big risk by using their own cloud services,” said Ed Anderson, an analyst with Gartner. Unfortunately, details are sparse as to exactly how the company will keep data protected, beyond following standard practices such as encrypting data as it flows from a device to the cloud. Predix Cloud provides advanced connectivity-as-a-service for these industrial assets, combining proprietary technologies with global telecommunications partners to enable rapid provisioning of sensors, gateways and software-defined machines.
Since partnering last year to deliver industry-specific business apps for iPhones and iPads, the relationship between Apple and International Business Machines Corp. has gotten a little bit cozier. The architecture of the platform is designed to be downright paranoid. “Each layer will go with the stringent assumption that every other layer has already been breached,” Kodesh says. Security + Compliance: Incorporating decades of experience in operational security and information security, Predix Cloud is designed with the most advanced security protocols available, including customized, adaptive security solutions for industrial operators and developers. The Wall Street Journal’s Converge conference brought together executives and investors to discuss the region’s emergence as a driver of technological innovation.
By allowing just anyone to upload an application to its servers, companies like Amazon and Google in theory risk opening themselves up to attacks where one customer’s application breaks free of its virtual environment and steals data from another customer’s app. This type of attack is mostly hypothetical thus far, but by carefully screening who can use its service, GE can reduce its chances of falling victim to such a scheme. The catch, Kodesh says, is that all these extra security layers and custom features require more processing power, which will increase the cost of using its cloud. “But the industrial market is so concerned about security that we think it’s the right service to offer them,” he says. Major League Baseball’s technology arm has struck a deal to pay $600 million to the National Hockey League for digital and television rights to its out-of-market games, the WSJ’s Shalini Ramachandran reports. All of which sounds great, so long as GE—or someone else—finds a way to make sure those connected devices and the data they generate don’t fall into the wrong hacker’s hands.
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