American conglomerate General Electric is building the first ever public cloud platform designed specifically for machine data.

The Predix Cloud is based on the recently launched Predix software platform, which can capture and analyze sensor information from networked devices in industries like aviation, energy, healthcare and transportation, with a special focus on security and compliance measures.

From 2016, these features will be available as-a-Service in GE’s own data centers.

“A more digital hospital means better, faster healthcare. A more digital manufacturing plant means more products are made faster. A more digital oil company means better asset management and more productivity at every well. We look forward to partnering with our customers to develop customized solutions that will help transform their business,” said Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE.

GE Cloud
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Heroes of industry

As a manufacturing giant that makes everything from microwave ovens to jet engines, GE is interested in the growth of industrial Internet. It is also interested in growing its software capabilities – the company expects to make $6 billion in software revenues in 2015.

The upcoming Platform-as-a-Service kills two birds with one stone: it will be used by GE internally to modernize its operations, and offered to customers as the entire stack, both software and hardware.

The Predix Cloud will include asset connectivity tools, device management, support for various types of machine data and industrial-grade security and compliance. GE says special care has been given to national data sovereignty regulations, something that will be very relevant in Europe.

The application development and deployment elements have been borrowed from Pivotal’s Cloud Foundry - an open source cloud platform originally developed by VMware. This follows a $105 million investment in Pivotal made by GE in 2013.

The Predix Cloud will be available on-demand, using a pay-as-you-go pricing model. It will also be available in third-party public cloud environments, if required by a customer.

“GE’s Predix Cloud will unlock an industrial app economy that delivers more value to machines, fleets and factories - and enable a thriving developer community to collaborate and rapidly deploy industrial applications in a highly protected environment,” said Harel Kodesh, VP and GM of Predix at GE Software.