HP and GE to Deliver New Industrial IoT Solutions

Hewlett-Packard is teaming up with GE digital in an effort ‘to unite cutting-edge Internet of Things (IoT) technologies from HPE with GE’s industrial expertise and it's Predix platform to bring digital know-how to the industry sector. Together, the two companies will enable industrial analytics from the edge to the cloud.’

GE, better known for its robust wind turbines, jet engines and train locomotives, has in the last few years adapted to software and the ability to analyze data as the way to render them more efficient.
As per the new partnership, HPE's IoT technology will combine with Predix, GE's cloud-based Platform-as-a-Service for the industrial machine data, to provide more focused IoT solutions.

“We are building an ecosystem with world-class partners who share our commitment to delivering better outcomes for our customers,” said Denzil Samuels, Head of Global Channels and Alliances, GE Digital. “By combining HPE’s key infrastructure capabilities with the Predix platform, we are enabling our customers with industrial analytics and the ability to leverage new insights that were not possible before.

HPE's Executive VP John Hinshaw said the two companies will jointly go after business in the aerospace, oil and gas and manufacturing industries, and have been doing so informally for a while.

"What we're talking about is connecting hundreds of thousands of big machines, and each one of those is surrounded by thousands of little machines," GE Digital CEO Bill Ruh said in an interview. Last year he predicted that GE's digital products like Predix would bring in $15 billion by 2020, and more disclosures from GE about the size of that business are expected this month.

From GE’s perspective, HP brings forth basic computing and networking hardware needed to handle all the data and the reach to traditional IT customers who buy it which GE presently doesn’t have.

Though the critics believe there hasn’t been much in the way of results for IoT besides hype; that isn’t stopping big brands from investing in the technology. The main complaint is that all the connected things are generating so many data that there's no efficient way to analyze it all to find those money-saving insights without investing huge amounts in more computing hardware and highly paid analysts.

Networking giant Cisco Systems spent more than $1 billion to buy Jasper, a cloud-based IoT service and has a strong lead with car manufacturers. Just last week, Cisco teamed up with IBM, a significant HPE rival, to push IoT data into its Watson cognitive computing system.