GE Invests in Pivotal to Accelerate New Analytic Services and Solutions for the Industrial Internet

GE will invest $105 million in the cloud-based software applications company Pivotal. The strategic investment in the VMware and EMC spin-off will allow GE to speed up development of advanced analytic services for the Industrial Internet.

The apps will allow customers to analyze and understand big data generated by machines and stored in the cloud. “It’s no secret that the cloud and big data are driving dramatic business transformation,” said Bill Ruh who leads GE Global Software Center in San Ramon, California. “They are enabling the Industrial Internet.”

Click to enlarge


Over the last two decades, the Internet has transformed media, communications and advertising. The Industrial Internet combines that connectivity with low-cost sensing to turn big iron into brilliant iron. It has the potential to save a motley group of customers ranging from airlines to oil and gas companies and hospitals hundreds of billions of dollars by becoming more efficient.

Pivotal is based in San Francisco, just across the bay from San Ramon where the GE Global Software Center opened 18 months ago. Hundreds of GE software engineers are already writing Industrial Internet software at the center.

Ruh said that Pivotal was creating a platform that brings to businesses the Internet’s best features like rapid application development, data analytics and cloud architecture. “This is aligned with many of the things we are doing at GE to help accelerate our delivery of innovation, and to bring a productivity revolution that will have a positive impact on all of us,” Ruh said.

Click to watch today's live press conference.

Paul Maritz, Pivotal CEO, said that the GE investment in his company underscored “the profound change in business and the historic opportunity that Pivotal has in delivering a platform to help GE’s customers succeed.”

“We are experiencing a major change in the wide-scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructural transformation and transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud, mobility and big data,” Maritz said. “This transformation is also happening in enterprises where their environments must adapt to a world that is data-centric, agile and real-time.”

The investment is expected to close within a month, subject to standard regulatory approval and other closing conditions.