Photo: James Lee, Chester, NH, USA

Welcome to Brilliance@Work, a series of profiles about stellar executives and their best practices at work. Throughout May, we’ll feature Data Science experts.

Beena Ammanath is Executive Director, Data Science at GE. She’s also a keynote presenter at the Marketing Analytics & Data Science Conference on June 8-10, 2016 in San Francisco, California.

Beena Ammanath

As a preview to her presentation “Industrial Internet: Building the Digital Industrial World with Data Science,” Beena shared how GE is leading the Industrial Internet.

Peggy L. Bieniek, ABC: How is GE helping to shape the future of the Industrial Internet?
Beena Ammanath: The Industrial Internet presents incredible opportunities to connect the world of really important things, and ongoing digital transformation is changing all industries. With 50 billion machines expected to come online by 2020, the Industrial Internet’s impact on GE, our customers and the world is tremendous.

In leading the Industrial Internet, GE has transformed its business by building and deploying Predix, an Industrial IoT platform and opening the platform to non-GE assets. Predix – the world’s first and only cloud platform built exclusively for industry – is the foundation for our Industrial Internet offerings. It offers the strength, scale and security for industrial customers to use with industrial data.

We are actively deploying Predix across our business, IT, and manufacturing operations. We’re also working with many customers to use Predix to secure and monitor the approximately $1 trillion GE industrial assets deployed worldwide.

PB: What were some of the benefits GE realized from the Industrial Internet implementation?
BA: Big data and data analytics have brought about a radical change in how our operations do business. We utilize sensors and data processing in our machines to enable predictive maintenance and repair breakdowns even before they occur.

We’ve already seen a reduction of 10-20% in unplanned downtime in our own factories, as well as improved cycle time, improved customer service and reduced costs in the facility.

PB: What makes GE’s Industrial Internet offerings unique?
BA: Unlike general-purpose platforms, Predix is optimized to support industrial use cases.

Other platforms and companies lack GE’s deep domain knowledge of assets to enable anything more than general predictive analytics.

Predix was designed specifically to handle the velocity, variety and volume of industrial data from millions of machines, where other platforms remain focused on enterprise data.

Only Predix delivers the end-to-end security that satisfies strict data governance, privacy and integrity requirements – that support over 60 regulatory frameworks worldwide. Other platforms are slow and costly. Predix offers developers the tools to automate the “coding to deployment” cycle, where they may spend up to 80% of their development time integrating with other systems.

PB: What will people gain from attending your keynote at the Data Science conference?
BA: Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the Industrial Internet, the characteristics of Industrial Big Data and the kind of business outcomes we can achieve in the Industrial space leveraging Data Science.

Want to hear more from Beena Ammanath? Join us at the Marketing Analytics & Data Science Conference. Learn, network and share best practices with the most influential leaders in data science and analytics. Stay connected at #MADSCONF.