GE is making its entrance into the cloud computing market, and is ready to take it by storm. The company plans to provide cloud-based analytics services to industrial customers, creating an “Industrial Internet cloud” that uses big data analytics to help provide new insights and information.

This service is aimed at customers that use heavy machinery and manufacturing goods and services from GE, and can help them make decisions about what products they need and how to put them to use. This ties in with GE’s major products – its Predictivity line, and the Proficy Historian HD, which provide real-time data analytics and historical analysis, respectively.

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GE has announced its new product in conjunction with Amazon Web Services and Pivotal, using big data analytics from Hadoop, so this is made with plenty of teamwork, but it demonstrates GE’s ability to package technologies as a cloud-based service. This will also allow them to release it far more quickly than they would by developing everything in-house. GE will work with customers to create solutions in the public cloud, or on their own premises, and is already creating the building blocks necessary for the services.

Of course, there is much to be said for big data analytics. With machine-to-machine and batch data everywhere, one has to be able to capture and analyze vast amounts of data, which is possible only with the right tools. Those tools, naturally, will be provided through GE’s new cloud services.

“It is only in the ability to quickly analyze, understand, and put machine-based data to work in real-time that points us to a society that benefits from the promise of big data,” says Bill Ruh, GE’s vice president of global software. “This is what the Industrial Internet is about.”

While GE may not be taking over the cloud computing market, it’s definitely contributing something that many will find useful. The big data analytics will provide much to its customers, who can gain new insights and ideas from the information it provides, while it can be built to work with the company’s needs. While there is nothing to present quite yet, there’s a lot to look forward to with this.