General Electric has long been one of the biggest companies in the world. The firm has had massive success in a number of different areas, from healthcare to manufacturing. Recently, the CIO of GE Water & Power named a few ways the company has found success. The CIO pointed to data blending, scalable storage and processing, as well as the maturing of the Internet of Things (IoT) as factors shaping the way the company is doing business -- and doing it well.
Jim Fowler has been working with the company for more than 10 years and says a number of changes recently have made the $28 billion unit of GE to up its game. Fowler was talking during a keynote speech at the InformationWeek Conference in Las Vegas.
"Not only do we now have 100 million hours of operating-data and maintenance-and-part-swap-data across 1,700 turbines, but we can now marry that with external data such as weather information and process against it in one place," Fowler said.
GE Water & Power has managed to combine a set of external data with a terabyte of data per day. This combination uses its sensor-equipped turbines in order to make this happen in a big and successful way. Fowler said GE is helping customers see a somewhat small in the beginning savings that grows rather quickly. The one percent improvements over the course of a year will see about $2 million to $5 million per turbine. While that might seem small to a multi-billion company, over the next 15 years, the company is expecting to see savings of about $66 billion across all of the 1,700 turbines the company has in operation.
Fowler pointed to the Industrial Internet and its emergence as the biggest trend that has kept the company going strong. GE has had a strong hand in the development of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), and the firm clearly believes that machine to machine technology is only going to be helping the company grow in the next few years.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey