

To protect business servicing machines, GE turns to the industrial Internet - cpeterso
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527381/ges-1-billion-software-bet/

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lgleason
For a brief period I also worked at GE-Energy on their Smart Grid. This
company has way too much bureaucracy to be effective in this space. The number
of hoops you had to jump through to get a basic development environment set up
were absurd. Many of the situations I ran into came right out of Dilbert land.

GE would be much better served by partnering with other companies and focusing
on making hardware and machinery.

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kken
The real reason why GE is turning to "industrial internet" is because European
firms have started a similar initiative previously, called "Industry 4.0":

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_4.0)

Of course, GE will try to establish its own standards, which are incompatible
to those of their competitors (e.g. Siemens).

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philliproso
For a brief period I worked at GE-IP. The reason I did not continue was, I
felt I could add more value to the customer by using open source software and
was not allowed to use it.

I was working in the mining industry. Where deep vendor lock-in is seen as the
only path to success. GE follows this model to the core. Before a major
revolution there needs to be more open source industrial software.

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tfigment
I work in an industrial space similar to GEs space and we generate high
volumes of data from our machines in a distributed network. The data is really
valuable in operating and optimizing our systems as well as doing reliability
analysis. Somehow we convinced our customers to pay for a separate network
connection as part of the agreements and do the VPN security. We do not
operate over the customer networks except in certain cases and then both sides
are super paranoid and isolate each other as much as possible.

We did a lot of the software in-house with open source except were we could
not. Every once and a while we talk with GE-IP, OSI, Wonderware, and other
large vendors in the space but talks always fall through in the end because
its just really expensive. Even with steep discounts these vendors cost
several millions of dollars over 3-5 years more than what we currently do for
<$500K a year (most of that cost is the vendor software where open source is
not available).

Vendor lock-in is a terrible problem for us. I'm pretty sure we do not get the
value we are paying for. In one case we are using an 8 year old version
because the 3-4 versions released since had major compatibility or breaking
changes that we found unacceptable and then they started putting in intrusive
always-on DRM-like licensing and actually cause more downtime for us so we
don't use it and I'm trying to find a practical way out.

I want to use open-source and I would like my company to support putting our
work back into open-source but I don't see it happening. There are way too
many fears of loss of IP and effort to get lawyers involved to support it so
it probably won't happen. I agree the industrial networking space is ready for
disruption one of these days but its not exactly web pages that anyone can do
out of school so it does not get open-sourced much but I think its coming soon
enough.

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spitfire
What industry is this? There seems to be a lot of spaces where a few smart
people could make a lot of difference. And it sure beats doing locsomobile
amafacegoosoft.

EDIT: I am genuinely asking about the industry because I want to find spaces
to expand to.

~~~
tfigment
SCADA systems basically is the area you are interested in. Real-time
industrial equipment monitoring (and control). Typically these are thick
clients but people are clamoring for mobile and thin-client access to real-
time data as well as historical time-series data. There are some very serious
security threats in this space which is why the gorillas have leverage (not
that they are really secure though).

Time-series historians are expensive if you log a large amount of data. There
are several attempts at this like OpenTSDB which is a historian on hbase and
is where GE is trying to go. We looked at their offering briefly and its hard
to say if hadoop is good enough for near real-time but it looks good for long-
trend analysis I think.

~~~
spitfire
Ahh SCADA systems. Definitely something that should get some serious
attention.

I'm looking for legacy or underserved complete verticals I can bring some
modern technology to. Right now, that's low finance.

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001sky
_A challenge for GE is that it doesn’t yet have access to most of the data its
machines produce. Courtney says about five terabytes of data a day comes into
GE. Facebook collects 100 times as much. According to Richard Soley, head of
the Industrial Internet Consortium, a trade group GE created this year,
industry has been hobbled by a “lack of Internet thinking.” A jet engine has
hundreds of sensors. But measurements have been collected only at takeoff, at
landing, and once midflight. GE’s aviation division only recently found ways
to get all the flight data. “It sounds crazy, but people just didn’t think
about it,” says Soley. “It’s like the Internet revolution has just not touched
the industrial revolution.”_

The privacy, industrial espinoge, and confidentiality issues will always be
interesting in this area.

~~~
hga
Indeed; while it might be more speculation that reality (the firm is not
saying much, but see [http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/email-attack-on-
vendor-se...](http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/email-attack-on-vendor-set-
up-breach-at-target/) for what it's worth), I remember reading that it was
thought Target was compromised through the path they supplied to a
refrigerator and freezer vendor, which they didn't properly segregate or
otherwise manage.

There's very strong use cases for this, e.g. those responsible for a store
would much prefer being told quasi-immediately that a unit has failed instead
of finding it full of ruined food when they arrive in the morning.

