Big Data Watch: Why does GE gamble on software?

Earlier this week, GE announced that it would invest 105 million of dollars in a new platform, Platform-as-a-service, a company that is pivotal, made up of EMC and VMware's spin-off divisions. Why? A part of GE's future relies on software and services to support the increasingly intelligent machines it sells. By investing in pivotal, GE hopes to create and deploy large data http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/6441.html "> Commercial applications" faster for customers.

"As we all know, we have a lot of profit from Universal machine support services," said Bill Ruh, vice president of General Electric and business officer at the Global Software Center. "Machines are becoming smarter, and our customers need machines and employees to be more productive." ”

Indeed, GE's services have generated about 45 billion dollars in revenue. Bill Rong said GE would use pivotal technology as a service standard to provide data analysis and cloud architecture support in the future. From the airline industry to the healthcare industry, GE's customers are gathering unprecedented amounts of data, thanks to the growing number of smart devices with sensors-what GE calls the "industrial Internet". The level of data on TG will help customers better manage their machines, consume less energy, optimize maintenance and operations-that is, they need to have the right applications to quickly analyze data and give actionable decisions. This is also GE's strategic point of entry.

"We are learning from the development of consumer Internet-Google, Facebook and Amazon," says Bill Rong. "These companies find ways to manage mass information and apply it to new services." ”

It is no secret that GE has been exerting its power in the software field. Last year, the company launched a software development agency at San Ramon, Calif., not far from the heart of Silicon Valley. The Bay Area (Bay Office) currently has 425 employees, and all are studying "next-generation services", says Bill Ron. Jeff Immelt, General Electric chief executive, recently announced an investment of $1 billion to develop applications that combine machine diagnostics and analytics. GM says new application tools are likely to help industries such as energy and transportation reduce waste worth 150 billion of dollars (such as configuring probes and smart software for airplanes to reduce unnecessary maintenance costs). GE plans to launch 20 new industrial Internet services in 2013.

GM's $105 million trillion will get a 10% stake in Pivotal, which is now managed by Paul Pietermaritzburg, the former CEO of VMware. He said pivotal would be a cloud-independent company, meaning the company's new development platform would be outside the cloud services of Amazon, Microsoft and VMware, while allowing companies to run commercial applications on their own servers.

This is a very ambitious goal, Pietermaritzburg the universal ideal as a "new era platform." Similarly, it is likely that the goal will still take years to implement--pivotal until 2013 to release its first product. But the company has attracted some notable supporters. "We think pivotal will be a very important partner," Bill said this week at Pivotal's release, "This is the platform we use to provide next-generation data-driven applications." "With the help of pivotal, will GE be able to do apps like Google and Facebook?" Unknown. At least 105 million dollars in investment, GE says.