Transforming GE through Industrial Internet

This case discusses the digital transformation that New York-based industrial conglomerate, General Electric (GE), achieved with its Industrial Internet initiative. The initiative started in 2011 with GE setting up a center at San Ramon, California, aimed at adding networking and distributed intelligence capabilities to all its machines ranging from industrial and grid control systems to aircraft engines. The data derived could be analyzed to increase efficiency since each and every aspect of an industrial operation could be monitored and tweaked for optimal performance, thus reducing down-time and enhancing productivity across all the verticals the industrial giant served.

As part of its Industrial Internet strategy in 2012, GE launched its Predictivity line of IoT services. According to GE, the Predictivity platform could help companies in industries such as aviation, healthcare, energy, transportation, and manufacturing to benefit from real-time insight and analytics. By 2013, GE’s Predictivity solutions had clocked revenues of US$ 290 million. In June 2013, GE launched its Big Data and analytics platform for the Industrial Internet, robust enough to manage the huge data produced by large-scale industrial machines in the cloud.