Upstart Poaches GE Executives as It Chases Predix Customers
August 08 2018 - 4:43PM
Dow Jones News
By Ted Mann
As General Electric Co. looks to shed parts of its software
unit, smaller competitors see an opportunity to challenge the
conglomerate in a business it had hoped to dominate -- using data
to improve the performance of industrial machines.
One startup, Uptake Technologies Inc., has hired several
executives from GE this year as it chases after GE's existing
customers. In February, the company hired Ganesh Bell, GE's first
chief digital officer, as its president. The company has also
poached Jay Allardyce, the chief product and marketing officer at
GE Digital, and Scott Bolick, formerly head of software strategy at
GE's power business.
The Chicago startup is one of several looking to use industrial
data culled from sensors embedded in machines like wind turbines
and locomotives. It was started in 2014 and was valued at $2
billion in a venture funding round last year. The firm's customers
include Berkshire Hathaway Energy, for which Uptake helps crunch
data from wind farms, and Progress Rail, a subsidiary of
Caterpillar, Inc. which is GE's chief rival in the freight
locomotive business.
Another competitor is C3 IoT, which is run by Thomas Siebel, who
sold his previous business software company, Siebel Systems to
Oracle Corp., in 2006. C3, which has raised more than $300 million
in venture capital, has signed up John Deere, 3M and others as
customers.
Such upstarts are betting that GE and former CEO Jeff Immelt
were right that the ability to gather and analyze vast amounts of
data would create a market for software applications among the
operators of power plants, freight railroads and airplane
fleets.
But the small firms are betting that software companies -- not
manufacturers of the machinery themselves -- will control the
business. "GE's vision was right," Mr. Bell said in a video aimed
at early adopters of GE's software, called Predix. But he added
that his company is "fiercely independent" of equipment makers like
GE and Siemens.
GE and rivals like Siemens AG say they aren't ceding ground. GE
Chief Executive John Flannery wrote in a blog post last week that
GE Digital remains "a critical piece of how we solve industrial
problems for our customers -- by building software and other
digital tools for power plants, airlines, hospitals and other
industrial customers."
GE says it will continue to use its Predix software platform to
improve operations within its industrial businesses, and as an
offering to customers. The company says it has 1,000 Predix
customers, and that Predix revenue doubled in 2017.
Last week, Siemens agreed to pay 600 million euros ($730
million) in cash to acquire Boston-based software firm Mendix Inc.
The company makes "low code applications" that support rapid
deployment and use of applications in the cloud.
Write to Ted Mann at ted.mann@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 08, 2018 16:28 ET (20:28 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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