Infosys partners GE to develop new industrial internet solutions

Infosys, India's second-largest IT services company, has collaborated with GE and others to enter the business of industrial internet with the creation of new Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that are designed to help manufacturers and other industrial enterprises improve asset efficiency and build more intelligent linkages between design, production and field testing.

The new IoT solutions will help manufacturers derive practical benefits from massive amounts of data generated through connected devices in the industrial enterprise, Infosys said in a release.

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), an international body of industries, governments and academics focused on developing best practices for the Industrial Internet, recently approved two Infosys-led testbeds, including an 'Asset Efficiency Testbed' and an 'Industrial Digital Thread Testbed'.

The Asset Efficiency Testbed enables holistic monitoring, analysis and optimisation of critical infrastructure assets. The first use case focuses on predictive maintenance for an industrial asset such as aircraft landing gear. Infosys will demonstrate this at the GE's 'Minds & Machines' conference today.

The 'Industrial Digital Thread Testbed' creates more intelligent linkages between the three phases of manufacturing – design, production and field testing / service. By capturing, analysing and relaying real-time sensory and historical data at each of these phases, the Industrial Digital Thread (IDT) will generate insights that can help field engineers and service teams identify the root cause of component failure easily, and provide faster corrections to flaws in design engineering and manufacturing operations.

IDT leverages two open-standard big data analytics engines - the Infosys Information Platform (IIP), which provides in-memory data analytics and big data management, and GE's Predix platform that delivers data acquisition, processing and user interface and application development. IDT has been co-developed by Infosys and GE, and will be implemented first as a pilot project at GE Aviation.

"The Industrial Internet Consortium was established to help organisations break down the barriers of technology silos and support better integration of the physical and digital worlds. We see brilliant manufacturing as the next wave of Industrial Internet innovation, following asset performance management. We are excited about our most recent collaboration with Infosys to advance these two areas and drive increased efficiency and productivity for industry," Bill Ruh, chief digital officer, GE Digital, said.

"The internet of things is about dissolving the layers of complexity and the intermediaries that create distance between the point of manufacturing and the point of consumption, between understanding and preventing points of failure in the manufacturing process, in machines or in critical processes, and between what the customer wants and what is delivered. The value comes from bringing intelligence directly to these end-points, and in doing this we can completely reimagine the notion of industrial manufacturing, and every industry, and we look forward to doing much more in our work with GE in these areas," Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka said.

Sikka will deliver the keynote address at GE's Minds & Machines conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

The Industrial Internet Consortium defines a test-bed as "a controlled experimentation platform, conforming to an Industrial Internet Consortium reference architecture, where solutions can be deployed and tested in an environment that resembles real-world conditions. Test-beds explore untested technologies or existing technologies working together in an untested manner. Test-beds generate requirements and priorities for standards organisations, and culminate in new (potentially disruptive) products and services."