[bubbabojangles]

As a customer of GE software products, I've seen their core products falter a bit while they attempted to prop up the Predix platform. Maybe it will be a breath of fresh air when/ if they sell Predix, hoping that they will focus more on their core products. It is difficult to sell a platform to industrial customers, as many of the ideas are too abstract to understand what it can do for you and how much money it will make for you.

[ovi256]

This could very well be an electricity like situation.

If you have a factory moving on a pre-electricity prime-mover (probably a coal engine) and distribution system (probably axes and belts everywhere) and some one comes and pitches you electricity, you don't see the advantages. You see the costs of putting electric motors in all your machines, hiring all these expensive electric engineers and technicians, and basically rebuilding your factory for electricity. I see a similar dilemma here. Most industrial units will have to be rebuilt to take advantage of industrial IoT.

[karmicthreat]

Its not quite that bad. You can have a plant edge device that pulls information out of your plant PLCs. Maybe without code changes on the PLC. This data can then go into an analytics platform for whatever reporting you want. The problem is nobody sees much value in the reporting.

[laythea]

I work in the industry and would agree. Also, nobody has software intelligent enough to extract the value out of the data. Maybe one day.