GE Digital (www.ge.com/digital) announced it has acquired Bit Stew Systems (Burnaby, B.C., Canada; www.bitstew.com) to bring its data intelligence capabilities to Predix and other industrial solutions. Bit Stew applies its machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to automate the process of data modeling, mapping and ingestion, accelerating time to value for customers, such as BC Hydro, Pacific Gas & Electric and Scottish & Southern Energy. This acquisition will help GE Digital provide a solution to organize large amounts of data through efficient data organization at the edge or at the source of the data – the asset.
Integration of Bit Stew’s technologies into the Predix platform will provide improved ability to integrate data while it is in motion – from the edge to the cloud – and will allow industrial companies to gain better insight into data coming from the edge. This combined capability provides customers with a solution to efficiently organize large amounts of data at the source, enabling more rapid realization of Industrial Internet value.
GE Digital also acquired Wise.io, a leading machine learning and intelligent systems company. This acquisition will enable GE Digital to further accelerate development of advanced machine learning and data science offerings in the Predix platform. The Wise.io team deepens GE’s machine learning stack and will spearhead innovative solutions in GE’s vertical markets to develop its machine learning offerings. Current Wise.io customers include Pinterest, Twilio and Thumbtack.
Industrial machine learning is critical to GE’s development of scalable Digital Twin solutions and data-intensive industrial computing challenges. Running on Predix, Digital Twins are virtual twins of an industrial asset – a jet engine, a wind turbine or an entire power plant. Twins continuously collect data from physical and virtual sensors and rely on advanced machine learning techniques to analyze the data to gain insights about performance and operation. Wise.io’s deep machine learning expertise – combined with GE Digital’s existing data science talent and massive portfolio of industrial assets – will advance GE’s Digital Twin capabilities and solidify its role as a leader in industrial machine learning.
This news follow GE’s recent acquisition of ServiceMax, a leader in cloud-based field service management solutions, which enables GE Digital customers to immediately gain more productivity from their assets and find greater efficiency in their field service processes. Other GE acquisitions in the digital industrial space include Meridium and Wurldtech.