Every tech vendor is sure to line up significant announcements for their high-profile conferences, but GE Digital may have overachieved this week in conjunction with its IoT-focused Mind + Machines event.
On Monday, it announced the $915 million acquisition of field services software vendor ServiceMax. On Tuesday, GE Digital revealed two more recent acquisitions, of machine learning startups Wise.io and Bit Stew Systems. All three properties will be aligned with Predix, GE Digital's core platform for Industrial Internet applications.
Yet another key announcement regarded Predix System. While Predix to date has been cloud-based, Predix System gives companies the ability to spread out their IoT footprint:
This new set of components can run on a variety of operating systems, devices and form factors – from sensors and controllers to gateways, server appliances and the cloud – making Predix a distributed system for the Industrial Internet and a complete “edge-to-cloud” offering.
What's the point? A GE Digital executive explains it concisely in an interview with IDG News Service:
“You have to take advantage of all those compute nodes so you can choose the right tradeoff of latency and cost,” said Harel Kodesh, CTO of GE Digital and vice president of Predix, in an interview. For example, the code that shuts down a pipeline in case of a leak should run as close as possible to the leak sensor rather than up in the cloud, where there will be a longer delay before the shutdown command can reach the site.
"GE and their executives from the CEO down continue to demonstrate a commitment to driving change in their main business markets through IoT," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland. "Mind + Machines has become the key event for anyone involved in the Industrial Internet or Industrie 4.0 where the numerous case studies of real deployments—all with impressive business value—delivers the GE promise of the power of 1 percent gains in productivity."
Mind + Machines is taking place during a busy week for the IoT market in general. On Monday, Samsung announced the $8 billion acquisition of automotive technology manufacturer Harman International. Most reports on the deal emphasized it as a push by Samsung into the smart car market. But it also points to broader emerging themes about IoT, Mulholland says.
"Once you grasp the implications of things being connected and interacting as the future, then you stop thinking about one-off integration and start to think about building ecosystems that group those items where interaction will build the highest value," he says. "One ecosystem of a connected car is clearly connected entertainment and information for the occupant. As with many ecosystem moves, the driving force is to requesting who or what is the real focal point of value. In this case it's the driver and occupants, and no longer the car as in the past. If you think in this way then Samsung will, as other companies are at the moment, go on to make still further acquisitions."
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