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GE Digital, SAP to Collaborate on Industrial Asset Performance

Collaboration is aimed at the oil and gas industry.

Written By

Nov 18, 2016

Two of the largest players in the industrial IoT space – General Electric and SAP – announced plans to collaborate on asset performance in the oil and gas industry.

The collaboration, announced at GE’s annual Mind + Machines conference, will focus on cloud-to-cloud interoperability as well as the SAP Asset Intelligence Network. The companies also reinforced a commitment to IoT standards and reference architectures. Integration between GE’s Predix operating system and the SAP HANA cloud platform will be strengthened.

“Enabling the owners, operators and makers of equipment to share data and context is an essential building block towards the enablement of end-to-end processes and our ‘Things to Outcome’ vision’,” said Dr. Tanja Rueckert, executive vice president, Digital Assets & IoT, at SAP.

“The cross-collaboration between GE and SAP will allow us to create opportunities for the Industrial IoT ecosystem,” said Denzil Samuels, global head of Channels & Alliances at GE Digital. “The partnership is an ongoing effort to expand joint go-to-market capabilities and accelerate innovation in rapidly growing markets for cloud platforms.”

SAP and GE are both leading members of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), a network of companies and universities that develops testbeds that act as blueprints for industrial IoT use cases such as predictive maintenance and production optimization. Both companies plan to reinforce their ongoing activities and uncover ways to work together on industry-leading standards to accelerate interoperability and convergence between IT and operational technology.

RTInsights Take: Because industrial equipment is so expensive (a single oil well can cost $10 million), the ability to predict maintenance on the asset, or optimize its output, offers huge benefits. Achieving that outcome, however, is complex, and often requires seamless integration in an IT ecosystem among devices, data, and cloud platforms. Both GE and SAP have been busy with acquisitions that overcome that challenge. GE Digital recently acquired Bit Stew Systems, which uses machine learning to integrate data from sensors, control systems, and other sources. SAP, meanwhile, recently acquired Plat.One, which developed a way to communicate with more than 40 different machine protocols. The collaboration between GE and SAP is likely to uncover further synergies that ease the path to industrial asset performance.