GE’s Digital DNA: When Big Data Was 30 Tons of Steel, Glass, and Copper

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One iPhone 5 is 9,000 times more powerful than the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer. Here an Army officer sets the switches on one of ENIAC's function tables.
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ENIAC was the first electronic computer.
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It was 66 years ago that the U.S. Army switched on the world’s first general purpose electronic computer and launched the information age. The army used the machine, called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), to calculate artillery trajectories. GE was the first company to tap the ENIAC for solving hard engineering problems.

There were other, mechanical computers before the ENIAC, write historians Dilys Winegrad and Astushi Akera, but “by showing that electronic computing circuitry could actually work, ENIAC paved the way for the modern computing industry that stands as its great legacy.”

The ENIAC was an unwieldy beast. It weighed 30 tons, held 18,000 vacuum tubes and required a small power plant to supply it with electricity. At 1,800 square feet, it was too big to fit in many New York City apartments. (By comparison, the iPhone 5 is almost 9,000 times more powerful). Programming the ENIAC and checking the code could take several weeks.

In 1954, GE bought its own computer, the Universal Automatic Computer I (UNIVAC I), and put computing at the core of the company. GE put the computer in Louisville, Ky., where engineers used it to build the first industrial computerized payroll for GE Appliances.

Over the years, GE computers monitored the liftoff of Apollo 11, which took the first humans to the moon, improved manufacturing control, and managed efficient asset allocation and other complex business problems.

Data is deep in GE's DNA. The company is now building the industrial internet, a network of computers, machines and low-cost sensors, and pushing into the cloud. Last spring GE partnered with Amazon Web Services, Accenture and Pivotal and to build the “machine cloud,” the first big data and analytic platform robust enough to manage the stream of data generated by turbines, jet engines, medical scanners and other technology. Bill Ruh, vice president of GE’s Global Software Center, says that the platform will be “the first viable step to not only the next era of industrial productivity, but the next era of computing.”

Thirty tons of steel notwithstanding, big data has never loomed larger.

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.”

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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.