General Electric has taken another big step into the industrial Internet of Things. The company has announced that its Predix IoT platform is going to offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
It’s basically a means of delivering the IoT services GE was already planning to offer. Its Predix platform was originally meant to leverage the data accumulated by the many sensors built into GE’s industrial equipment – a Platform as a Service (PaaS). GE’s IaaS is now going to offer a framework upon which clients and third-party developers can build applications that will use Predix. As TechCrunch points out, the development echoes IBM’s Bluemix platform, which was built to help foster the development of apps for IBM’s Softlayer data services.
Of course, GE places a much stronger focus on industrial services, and given that Predix will be working with huge amounts of data from clients’ industrial operations, the company says it’s being extra careful with security.
That could prove crucial in ensuring Predix’s success. There is already plenty of concern about the security of user data when it comes to the Internet of Things; breaches on an industrial scale could lead to much more serious consequences. And in focusing on security so intently, GE could prove more successful in winning wary clients, which could really pay dividends given the huge growth expected in this market.
Source: TechCrunch
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