GE Digital prepackages its Predix platform around business outcomes

GE Digital has predefined offerings that target the nexus of operational efficiency and business improvement by delivering a full range of capabilities around its Predix industrial IoT (IIoT) platform, including its asset performance management, data integration and specific prepackaged applications to bridge key functions, such as mining operations, electrical power generation and transmission, or oil discovery, refining and distribution.

The 451 Take

Envisioning outcomes is easy. Implementing IoT is hard. GE Digital is attempting to make the former as easy as the latter with a series of prepackaged IoT applications and self-service tools, beginning with its operations performance management (OPM) mining software, which applies analytics to real-time and historical data to track and proactively adjust processes to avoid problems and meet business goals. GE Digital also introduced Predix Studio, its first self-service tool, as a means of helping customers build their own apps inside a so-called a 'low-code, high-productivity environment.'

Context

Despite obvious benefits in improving predictability of operations, resulting in cost savings, IIoT has been a heavy lift to implement. Platform providers like GE Digital have built out a broad range of features, but left the bulk of the work of knitting together technology solutions to end customers or to partners such as Accenture. Although GE Digital bills Predix as more complete and inclusive of numerous key capabilities and technologies needed by customers, it's still a complex and lengthy effort to implement.

The addition of preconfigured, prepackaged IoT applications, focused on areas such as performance management, allows customers to focus on pursuing their desired outcomes from the outset – vs. wrestling with technology implementation. Although these prepackaged offerings still need to be applied to each customer's unique business processes, their unique blend of machinery, and their specific IT infrastructures, the prepackaged applications make the rollout far simpler by providing more measurable means of evaluating process.

The strategy shows that GE Digital has learned from its time in the marketplace. It still aims to provide IIoT, via Predix, as a means of putting customers on the path toward what the company calls digital industrial transformation. However, it is now emphasizing the value of a step-by-step approach that first includes addressing very specific operational needs and then extending outward to business outcomes.

The process delivers incremental improvements that GE Digital intends to help its customers move to transforming their operations, their practices and, ultimately, their business models. To that end, GE Digital aims to simplify IIoT implementation by doing the work up-front to combine Predix with AI/digital twin capabilities.

One of GE Digital's first prepackaged offerings, unveiled at its Minds + Machines conference in October 2017, is OPM for mining. OPM analyzes mining data with the aim of meeting overall performance metrics and business goals, including operational cost savings. GE Digital will apply the same capabilities to other industries in the coming year, the company said.

GE Digital also introduced Predix Studio as a kind of self-service tool to allow customers to build their own apps in what the company called a low-code, high-productivity environment. Prepackaging this range of applications, and making more self-service tools available over time, increases GE Digital's value to customers because the move furthers its goal of assisting customers in creating a system of interlocking systems, rather than just making the connections between their sensors to capture data.

The application-specific approach and its modularity also better map to market conditions since end customers require more verifiable, incremental and stepwise improvements from IIoT. Far fewer companies are investing massive dollars in IIoT transformation than originally expected by vendors, because very few can finance an immediate transformation, assuming they would want one.

Technology

Predix applies GE Digital's experience in industrial settings, including building, operating and managing complex infrastructures, to an underlying Cloud Foundry-based technology platform. Predix supports a hybrid, edge-to-cloud approach to connecting, monitoring and managing industrial equipment for optimization and ultimate business gain, through its range of capabilities and its ability to support add-ons through an app-store-like approach. Predix was among the first major IoT/IIoT platforms to acknowledge and support the need for edge.

The current and future prepackaged offerings combine Predix with AI/digital twin capabilities, and apply them to a variety of industries and use cases. The OPM application for mining was GE Digital's first prepackaged offering. However, we expect similar OPMs for oil and gas, electrical power generation and GE Digital's other key verticals.

We expect an OPM based around GE's PowerUP offering for wind turbines, for example. PowerUP includes apps for predictive maintenance, turbine optimization and energy-demand forecasting, which the company claims collectively help improve windfarm output and increase profits.

OPM, and GE's other expected offerings, work by combining analyzing both real-time and historical data to track mining processes and forecast events such that mining companies can proactively maintain their equipment or proactively act in ways that avoid problems. This ensures they meet or exceed performance metrics, achieving business goals for operational cost savings and revenue optimization.

Strategy

GE Digital, having faced slower than expected uptake of Predix, has refocused on its core constituency. Following suit with GE corporate, GE Digital has become more focused on how it addresses the market, choosing to focus on quality and depth of opportunity over quantity of engagements. To that end, the company will focus on vertical markets, including energy, oil and gas, healthcare, transportation and mining.

We expect GE Digital to map its prepackaged IoT applications to these industries and to adopt a big-picture system-of-systems approach, which allows massive industrial companies to connect and manage the equipment within each individual system and then interconnect each system to scale toward overall operational control, cost savings and improvement.

These companies would then be able to increase the scope of their IIoT usage into business management. The system of systems, which GE Digital often refers to as systems of intelligence, could be likened to linking the upstream (discovery), midstream (refining) and downstream (distribution and sales) operations for an oil and gas conglomerate.

GE Digital will continue to support a range of additional markets. But the company will do so via its partners, ranging from augmentative GE businesses, such as GE Current, to service providers, such as HCL Technologies. GE Current, an industrial lighting startup that will soon be spun off of GE, provides intelligent lighting systems, and pulls in Predix as its application platform.

HCL Technologies, in its role as a services provider, delivers integrated capabilities such as making Predix alerts available via Microsoft's Power BI. HCL demonstrated this capability at the Minds + Machines conference in October. GE Digital will work with a range of partners to address all other potential applications across its range of use cases.

Customers

Providing prepackaged IoT directly addresses the issues of complexity and ease of implementation for end customers. Prepackaging really means preconfiguring and pre-testing the various parts of an IoT product to ensure they work with each other and fit customer needs within the most common implementations.

To that end, GE Digital aims to simplify IIoT by eventually providing a set of prepackaged applications, based on Predix, as the building blocks that customers can use to create the foundations for their broad IIoT implementations. The applications leverage GE Digital's range of Predix and AI/digital twin capabilities, as well as those of its acquisitions, such as BitStew, and its key partners, such as Microsoft and Cisco.

The application's approach shows how GE Digital intends to follow these customers as they move through the process of connecting their operations, creating their unique views into those operations and then enacting cultural and business changes.

GE Digital acknowledges that it's using the prepackaged approach to become institutionalized with customers, and that the business value it provides does not come directly from Predix. Instead, that value comes from customers harnessing their operational data and applying it to business processes, from operational cost savings to sales improvements, at the right time to create new outcomes.

Competition

GE isn't alone in offering prepackaged IoT, or prepackaged IoT components, around industry-specific applications. Competitors, ranging from PTC to Oracle and SAP are providing similar offerings.

Oracle is focused on fleet management, field service and connected factories. PTC is aiming at manufacturing with its ThingWorx Manufacturing Apps, which sit on top of the ThingWorx platform and include native AI and 'codeless' programming. They each aim at a specific purpose, including asset connectivity, asset monitoring and real-time alerting, and production line monitoring, performance and status.

Although GE Digital has a far broader set of capabilities to bring to bear off the shelf, ranging from its support for continuous innovation/DevOps principles to its broad library of analytics and digital twin models, GE Digital is battling momentum when it comes to competition in the marketplace.

The Predix platform promises all of the same capabilities as IBM Watson IoT, AWS's recently updated IoT Suite and Microsoft's Azure IoT suite, as well as SAP's Leonardo. But where the others are largely horizontally focused, Predix is necessarily industry-focused with the aim of providing insights that generate operational efficiency, with security, for operational infrastructures for oil and gas, power generation and other industries.

The result has been partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, or loose affiliations with providers such as AWS, allowing Predix to become the front end of larger IoT implementations where GE Digital can bring Predix, its prepackaged offerings, and its recently acquired SerivceMax field service and BitStew data integration and intelligence capabilities to bear.