GE’s Predix Platform for Industrial IoT : Everything you need to know

GE’s Predix Platform for Industrial IoT : Everything you need to know

General Electric has been making the waves of late. Not for its innovations in electrical products, but for its endeavour into the very fast growing “Industrial IoT”. The company made much bigger news eventually by unveiling its public cloud service based on its Predix platform. The creation of such a platform was to help organizations in the industries of aviation, healthcare and even transportation work around with vast amounts of data generated through the use of sensors with relative ease in the form of industrial Internet of Things. In other words, generate intelligent environments. The idea behind the platform is to support the development of apps that can use real time data to provide better insights that could further lead to better decision making in the future.

This may seem quite ambitious considering the wide array of industries the Predix launch aims to deliver on. But with all of the headlines focusing on General Electric going big, it’s fair to asses that it could have repercussions too. Here’s everything you need to know about GE’s Predix Cloud Platform:

The Project is Highly Ambitious

As of now, GE has predicted that by the year 2020, approx. 50 billion devices will be connected to the internet. This evidently means huge amounts of data transfer, and the company aims to capture a major share in it. The company has already seen its revenues increase significantly over the years. With that in mind, GE believes its Predix Platform will succeed, provided users continue with the platform.Having been trying to constantly position itself as a major player in the IoT market, it’s still relatively early to point out just how ambitious this could be.

It Could be a Potential Threat to Amazon Web Services

There’s been much talk around Amazon’s Web Services having dominated the cloud infrastructure providing a variety of services through the internet. However, by targeting the industrial sectors, GE could be looking to create a new niche of audiences as being the only industrial based data and analytics service. With IoT continuing to take the world by storm, GE claims that it will spend up to $60 Trillion on its investment of infrastructure within the coming years.

It’s Aimed at Large Volumes of Data

It has been claimed that Predix cloud services would allow industrial operators the opportunities to work with large volumes of data much faster and moreover rather effectively. The idea behind this is to save big firms the effort and investment on resources to do so. This is achieved by combining the ever rising progress in Information Technology along with basic operational technology to provide connectivity on an unparalleled level by providing assets in connectivity, data support and more importantly, security. With this in mind, GE aims to make issues such as connectivity and other complications a thing of the past.

The Cloud is A Playground for Hackers

With all these talking points about cloud computing being the future of the industrial sector, the idea of security will always continue to be a cause for major concern especially considering that data security is a global issue. While GE will continue to talk up its advanced security protocols and data integrity, there’s no doubt that its servers will provide a golden opportunity for hackers looking to extract sensitive information. There’s also the added benefit that the cloud will be a part of a “gated community” since the platform is exclusively for industrial sectors. Nevertheless, data is valuable in any form.
With these pointers in mind, it’s hard to disregard the fact that the Predix platform is intended to change the world, to some extent. It’s a platform intended for intelligent applications that have the potential to transform a business. Such ambition is only meant to translate into possibilities and with GE’s endeavour, the situation seems quite limitless with the future looking bright.