GE announces data lake approach for industrial Internet

With a 2,000x performance improvement on time to analysis, major industrial companies can spend less time and money managing intensive processes and focus more on turning the data into actionable insight for increased productivity of assets and operations, GE said in a press statement.

Today GE is using the Industrial Internet data lake for managing and analyzing full flight data from its customers which include many of the world’s largest airlines.

 “Big Data is growing so fast that it is outpacing the ability of current tools to take full advantage of it,” said Bill Ruh, vice president, GE Software. 

“Working with Pivotal, we have created a unique industrial data approach that merges information technology (IT) with operational technology (OT) to better match the productivity and efficiency needs of our customers so they get the most value out of their mission-critical information.” 

“Big and fast data is a critical piece of how modern industry is reinventing itself in order to innovate and compete,” said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.

“The new industrial data lake architecture answers the call for the fast and highly scalable management of the unique industrial big data that is helping global enterprises transform their operations and build a new class of applications.” 

Developed on foundational software elements from Pivotal, the industrial data lake will integrate with PredixTM, GE's software platform for the Industrial Internet that provides a standard and secure way to connect machines, analytics, data and people and is built for the unique scale of industrial data. 

GE made the announcement following the strategic partnership between GE and Pivotal to jointly develop a new data architecture that meets the unique requirements of industrial data and critical infrastructure operations. 

All information must be converted into recognizable formats before it can be used - a process that has become the bottleneck when managing industrial Big Data. Conventional approaches like data warehouses can be too slow, expensive and inflexible with nearly 80 percent of project time spent on gathering and preparing the data for analysis.

All of GE’s PredictivityM software solutions benefit from this industrial data lake approach. It has been piloted in various industrial settings, including GE Aviation, where airplane engines are a fertile ground for Big Data collection and analysis. Using its Flight Efficiency Services, GE collects real-time data generated by the aircraft and its systems and runs advanced analytics on this data to help airlines run their operations more efficiently. For customers like AirAsia, this means savings of more than one percent of their fuel bill each year, the statement said.

“Gathering and analyzing data to improve our customers’ operations is no longer a futuristic concept, but a real process underway today, and growing in magnitude,” said David Joyce, president and CEO of GE Aviation.

In a 2013 pilot, GE Aviation collected information on 15,000 flights from 25 different airlines at about 14 gigabytes of metrics per flight. With the industrial data lake approach, GE was able to integrate terabytes of full flight data for the first time in industry to produce measurable cost savings of 10x and significantly reduce analysis time from months to days. GE expects the data collection to grow to 10 million flights and 1,500 terabytes of full flight operational data by 2015.