Will GE give a birth to a new PLM company?

by Oleg on July 9, 2014 · 8 comments

ge-datamanagement-initiative

Navigate back into histories of CAD and PLM companies. You can find significant involvement of large aerospace, automotive and industrial companies. Here are few examples – Dassault Systemes with Dassault Aviation, SDRC with US Steel, UGS with McDonnell Douglas. In addition to that, involvement of large corporation as strategic customers, made significant impact on development of many CAD/PLM systems for the past two decades. Do you think we can see something similar in the future?

Inc. article GE’s Grand Plan: Build the Next Generation of Data Startups made me think about some potential strategic involvement of large industrial companies in PLM software business. The following passage can give you an idea of how startups will be organized.

A team from GE Software and GE Ventures has launched an incubator program in partnership with venture capital firm Frost Data Capital to build 30 in-house startups during the next three years that will advance the “Industrial Internet,” a term GE coined. The companies will be housed in Frost’s incubator facility in Southern California.

By nurturing startups that build analytical software for machines from jet engines to wind turbines, the program, called Frost I3, aims to dramatically improve the performance of industrial products in sectors from aviation to healthcare to oil and gas. Unlike most incubator programs, GE and Frost Data are creating the companies from scratch, providing funding and access to GE’s network of 5,000 research assistants and 8,000 software professionals. The program has already launched five startups in the past 60 days.

This story connects very well to GE vision and strategy for so called Industrial Internet. The following picture can provide you some explanations of what is the vision of GE industrial cloud.

industrial-internet-applications

What is my conclusion? Industrial companies are looking for new solutions and probably ready to invest into ideas and innovative development. Money is not a problem for these companies, but time is very important. Startups is a good way to accelerate development and come with fresh ideas of new PLM systems. Strategic partnership with large company can provide resources and data to make it happen. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture credit of GE report.  

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Tagged as: Big Data, CAD, Data Management, GE, IoT, PLM

  • partner

    Interesting thought – what are the implications for the GEIP | PTC Alliance ?

  • beyondplm

    I don’t know. Need to ask GE and PTC.

  • davidp

    My thoughts exactly. I would back ptc to back into GE. It needs more than a blue chip customer base in order to survive

  • Guest

    GE has partnered with PTC in MES project. Both of the 2 company focus on IOT/industry internet, may have potential for collaboration.

  • beyondplm

    Thanks for explaining! They will have an advantage of coming first and discover problem and possible solution. I’m sure others will come too to stay competitive. It just a matter of time.

  • beyondplm

    It would be interesting to see how partnership between GE and PTC will go.

  • Chris Thaxton

    Remember, GE has been involved in this area many times. About 15 years ago, GE invested millions into what was then MatrixOne (now part of Enovia) and many years prior to that GE developed and built Calma, one of the first CAD companies.

  • beyondplm

    Chris, thanks for refreshing memories :) . I remembered Calma. However, I completely forgot about MarixOne and GE projects. It was easy to find —>

    MatrixOne Product Lifecycle Management Platform to Create a Single, Integrated Collaborative Environment for GE Industrial Systems
    http://www.hrhub.com/doc/matrixone-product-lifecycle-management-platfo-0001

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