GE Software Unit Expects To Hit $6 Billion In Sales This Year

GE may have something with its software business, announcing Tuesday (Nov. 15) that its software and services business is expected to hit $6 billion in sales in 2016.

According to a report, $6 billion in sales is 20 percent higher than what GE lodged in 2015. It also puts GE on track to reach its goal of having annual revenue of $15 billion in 2020. The growth is coming from Predix, which it calls an operating system for the industrial Internet of Things. Predix helps GE customers create software that can power internet-connected industrial machinery and have the machines communicate with each other. Some of the machines include jet turbines, trains and factory robots. Predix was on show this week at GE’s Minds + Machines confab, which is being held in San Francisco.

The idea behind Predix, said GE Digital Chief Executive Bill Ruh, according to the report, is to enable technology to handle more tasks and a variety of things. The goal is also to bring together as many partners as possible to make technology able to do more. “Every CEO is realizing they need to transform themselves,” Ruh said in the report.

GE also announced new solutions from Predix that are focused on specific industries — be it energy management, oil and gas or other specialized markets. There also new solutions to aid factory machine operators, maintenance workers and others that use Predix applications, noted the report. In conjunction with its announcements at Minds + Machines, GE disclosed it acquired two startups to help customers add data from their machines to the Predix cloud service. The two startups — BitStew and Wise.io — will also add artificial intelligence to the Predix software.