GE launches Predix Cloud service, says it will become available in 2016

GE, a company that sells consumer appliances as well as jet engines and other complex industrial equipment, today announced Predix Cloud, a version of its Predix machine data analytics software that will be accessible to companies as a cloud service.

GE businesses will start to migrate their software to the Predix cloud service in the fourth quarter of this year, and the service will become available to customers next year, GE said in a statement on the news today.

The service represents another attempt on the part of GE to get into the business of analyzing and acting on data from Internet-connected industrial devices. Other companies have been keen to get into that domain, but they’re primarily software companies. Splunk, for instance, comes to mind. But GE has a legacy business to protect and a brand name to build on.

GE first announced Predix in 2013. Last year, the company said its Predix software would become available in 2015.

GE has previously announced partnerships with Intel, Cisco, Pivotal (which GE funded), and Amazon Web Services, among others.

GE, which generated more than $148 billion in revenue in 2014, said in October that it was expecting to bring in $1 billion in “industrial Internet” revenue annually.