'Digi transformation is GE's core growth'

GE Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Victor Abate made it clear that the high tech infrastructure company is evolving into the world’s leading ‘digital industrial’ company – a transformation that is the core of GE’s growth plan globally.

In an interaction with Deccan Herald, Abate, who leads GE’s 50,000 engineers and scientists globally, put technology at the centre of this transformation. “The strategy is to take the physical assets that we have and use digital as a whole new opportunity to optimise them for our customers,” he said.

The integration of industrial machinery with innovative software, data analytics and sensors, enables customers to keep airplanes on time, prevent power outages, improve patient care, better manage natural resources, deliver sustainable energy and produce billions in operational efficiencies and costs savings.

Abate stated that the company has made significant investments to make it happen. “We have a dedicated team on GE Digital, but it’s also part of the fabric for the design of our physical assets,” he said, referring to the GE Digital business which was created in September 2015. Since 2012, GE has invested over $1 billion in software and today, employs more than 15,000 software professionals worldwide.

In India too, the company is building up a software presence. “So in Bangalore, we have people that are on GE Digital and we also have people that are doing the analytics,” said Abate. “It’s really the physical plus digital – to understand the physics of big machines and the digital aspect, and be able to connect that together to make for instance, efficient electricity and a cleaner environment.”

GE recently unveiled Predix,  a cloud platform for big data and analytics, and competes with IBM.