Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), recently visited Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology of the United States, and related partners on his way to China. One purpose of this trip is to promote the company's concept of "industrial Internet", that is, Predix, a cloud-based software platform. But this is known as the "industrial Internet operating system" fist products in the view of experts, the promotion may not be smooth.
Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), recently visited Miao Wei, Minister of Industry and Information Technology of the United States, and related partners on his way to China. One purpose of this trip is to promote the company's concept of "industrial Internet", that is, Predix, a cloud-based software platform. But this is known as the "industrial Internet operating system" fist products in the view of experts, the promotion may not be smooth.
Predix, a framework that includes source data from sensors, devices, cloud-based services, and open communications, is GE's new software platform that lets people load new applications to analyze, predict, diagnose, and use existing industrial machines more efficiently.
In 2012, Jeff Immelt said, for example, that everything from jet engines to gas turbines to CT(tomography) scanners will come with self-diagnostic and self-correcting intelligent analytics that will provide the right information to the right person in real time. Just over two years later, GE launched the software platform.
As a simple example, in the medical field, if more data is collected and analyzed from existing machines, perhaps doctors can prevent diseases or provide better solutions in time. GE has built a cloud-based product that collects data from individual machines and then provides it to doctors for judgment.
GE may want to make its own super platform, similar to the status of "Android" in the mobile phone field, unified standards and new applications, become the industry flagpole. In addition, GE has chosen partners such as Intel and Cisco to customize the cloud platform more suitable for industrial industries.
A senior expert in the power industry told the "First Financial Daily" reporter that in fact, similar platforms have existed in other industries, such as financial data mining, and GE wants to do a general cloud platform in the industrial field (including railway, medical, aviation, etc.) and push it to the market.
GE already has an APM (Asset Performance Management) system, and Predix is another new software platform based on APM, aimed at cloud applications, the person explained. Today, the APM system monitors and analyzes 50 million data per day from 10 million sensors on 1 trillion device assets, with the ultimate goal of helping customers achieve 100% trouble-free operation.
The open Predix operating system appears to have bright spots, but several experts disagree.
Anlin, a researcher at the Institute of Software and Information Services at CIDI think tank, told the media that even if GE opens Predix, users need to use GE's APM to achieve remote monitoring, diagnosis, and intelligent operation of devices. The difference is that the asset performance management scheme developed by users based on Predix is based on GEAPM system as the core and is suitable for their own, because the asset performance management scheme of different industries must include the characteristics and parameters of the industry.
Second, to implement the Predix platform, the groundwork is to collect massive amounts of historical data on the machine. And these historical data may be produced by other companies' machines, "for example, if you want to collect Siemens medical system data, enter the cloud platform, then Siemens is willing to?" Why would Siemens give this piece of the pie to GE instead of using its own powerful R&D staff to come up with new products? In other words, when it comes to cross-industry, cross-product issues, it is important for GE to convince large multinational companies, including ABB, Siemens and Schneider, to do this together." The power sector experts said.
Third, the machines Predix will connect to include not only machine tools and medical industries, but also sensitive areas such as aviation and the military, whose data is crucial to cities and countries. Whether local companies and relevant departments are willing to open up to GE for connectivity and let multinational companies lead the analytics industry on this basis is also a question mark.
GE's industrial Internet idea is constructive, but implementation is difficult. However, there are some small and medium-sized equipment manufacturers that may be willing to work with GE: through the open platform, small and medium-sized manufacturers can then leave such maintenance and analysis work to GE and other partners, and avoid the field themselves, but concentrate on selling equipment. But other big machine manufacturers are less sure.
