GE’s Global Research Center, its locomotives, medical scanners and other products, even the design/content of its annual reports have been prominent in my books and blogs for a long time. It is an extremely innovative company which keeps company with innovative customers. So, I always enjoy spending time at their annual Minds+Machines event.
At the first one, in 2012, I saw a company which was embedding sensors and software to make its products much smarter, to make their performance much more predictable and to move their business model to be more outcome focused. Having one of their massive GEnx aircraft engines as a stage prop reinforced the image they are into complex products and services.
Last year, and much more this year, I have seen it blossom into an IT platform (with Predix) and security player (with its Wurldtech acquisition). With a growing ecosystem of developers, the GE “app store” keeps expanding.
But GE is so different from the average IT vendor which tends to develop horizontal products and then spray paint some industry features and expertise and market that as “verticalization”. The sessions and booths at M+M reflected sectors where GE has deep institutional and product expertise.
Also, GE is unafraid of - in fact relishes - what I call “dull, dirty and dangerous” data. It is more into operational technology which interacts with the shop floor, with wind turbines in the wild, and with planes in mid-flight. If you see the Wurldtech positioning, it’s about industrial and operational security, with IT security as a subset of that.
GE (and peers like Siemens, Emerson, ABB and others) are honing a distinct category – OT (as in operational technology), far removed from traditional IT. It is more demanding, more mission critical, has more national security implications. Like I said, it covers “dull, dirty and dangerous” areas, but is far more strategic and value generating for GE and for its customers.
