GE Connects Industrial IoT

by Jessica Lipsky - EETimes

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29, 2015 – 

Connecting manufacturing and industry to the Internet is the next great frontier for OEM and manufacturer General Electric. The company showcased analytics platforms alongside hardware at an industrial Internet event with the intent of improving efficiency in a world where multi-year plans are no longer the main roadmapping tool.

"[The Internet] has not been fully realized throughout [the industrial segment] yet," said Rich Carpenter, chief of strategy for GE intelligent platforms. "If you're going to have a brilliant factory, brilliant machines, you need software."

Yet it's challenging to connect equipmen -- a large chunk of which is decades old -- in volume. To solve this problem, GE developed a number of "field agents" or gateways that can be directly attached to a piece of factory equipment and connect to a network. The field agents take approximately 4 hours to connect equipment and allow an operator to locally manage the machine, as well as provision information between the field agent and cloud.

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