GE has unveiled some heady ambitions for its industrial Internet of Things platform that it thinks will have hit $6 billion (around £3.9 billion, or AU$8.5 billion) in orders by the end of this year.
First reported by Tech Crunch, the company told attendees at its Minds + Machine conference in San Francisco that the Predix platform will have achieved $5 billion (around £3.3 billion, or AU$7.1 billion) in revenues and $6 billion (around £3.9 billion, or AU$8.5 billion) in orders by the end of 2015 and use that as a platform for future growth.
That wasn't all as GE also announced Predix.io, which is a Platform-as-a-Service offering that allows firms to build their own custom apps on top of Predix. It already boasts some 4,000 developers and this number is expected to hit 20,000 next year. A large chunk of those will be drawn from GE and its ISV partners.
On the software side of things, GE is offering up some industrial software packages on top of Predix such as Brilliant Factory and Digital Power Plant, which are both designed to gain the highest efficiencies from both products as possible.
The power plant software harvests information from sensors and other places then uses the data to work out how to generate more electricity from the same equipment. Brilliant Factories, meanwhile, works with data and compares this to a model and aims to get the maximum amount from machines as a reult.
$230 million in savings
GE's VP and global technology director Bill Ruh thinks it can save companies $230 million (around £151 million, or AU$327 million) per plant over a 20 year period. A big saving but also incredibly ambitious.
Industrial IoT, or Industry 4.0, was first mentioned by GE three years ago, and at the time it said it would boost global GDP by between $10 trillion (around £6.39, or AU$13.56) and $15 trillion (around £9.59, or AU$20.34) in 20 years. When you consider the earlier figures in this context you realise GE isn't being overly ambitious about its platform.
