Apple, GE Join Forces On Making Industrial Software

Apple and General Electric are joining forces to develop mobile apps for managing machinery, factories and power plants as the industrial giant steps up efforts to sell software and services.

The two companies announced that they are working together to make it easier to write software that can track power plants and jet engines on Apple's iPhones and iPads.

Both companies have come up with a tool for app developers to connect Apple’s iOS operating system more easily to Predix, the cloud-based software at the heart of GE’s effort to turn itself into a “digital industrial” company. GE plans to release the new software on October 26.

“More of the customers in the industrial world want to drive mobile experiences to their end users,” GE digital division head of sales Kevin Ichhpurani said. “Employees within those enterprises want those same experiences that they have in a consumer world.”

The Predix software connects sensor-laden industrial machines like wind turbines, jet engines and elevators to data centers, so that loads of information from the machines can be analyzed to help predict failures and make the machines run more cost effectively.

For example, Ichhpurani said, a power plant manager might be debating the best time to take a generator offline for scheduled maintenance. With the Predix software, the manager can see data on the machine and could share notes and photographs from an iPad at the site of the generator and even start a video call.

"These decisions can be made at the power plant or on the factory floor, as opposed to being made at corporate," Ichhpurani said.

GE expects the software to help produce $12 billion in digital revenue by 2020, though it took a two-month "time-out" earlier this year to sort out technical problems.

The partnership could give GE a jump on competitors such as Germany’s Siemens AG, Switzerland’s ABB Ltd. and France’s Schneider Electric, who have been adding software and data-analysis offerings. Such tools aim to improve the efficiency of products such as jet engines and medical scanners by predicting outages and ensuring that resources are used effectively.

Cupertino, California-based Apple, meanwhile, is leaning on companies with experience selling to businesses to push its software for iPhones and iPads, as it seeks to offset slowing global smartphone sales.

GE and Apple also plan to use the iPhone maker’s recently released augmented-reality tools to help train engineers and identify mechanical problems.

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