How GEs over dollar 100 billion investment in industrial internet will add dollar 15 trillion to world GDP

Sundar Murugappan is a quintessential Chennaiite who talks briskly as if in no mood to stop unless interrupted. The 27-year-old is a PhD from Purdue University where he spent many months studying "interactions" between human beings and computers, an area of research he says he loved the most.

He joined General Electric Co (GE) less than a year ago at its Global Software Center in San Ramon, California, as a "user experience researcher", a job that entails him to collect a lot of data besides writing software and doing surveys.

In the past several months, Murugappan and his colleagues have collected data on power outages in hospitals in parts of the US to help predict and avert outages, including those caused by "vegetation" on the streets. Currently, he is working on a health-care project where collecting data from hospitals means helping patients cut costs.

His suggestions include redesigning "patient experience" to avoid unnecessary treatment because a "good chunk" of those who get admitted to hospitals are those who just happen to be "hyper" when they arrive at hospitals for consultation.

"My work is simply exciting and new. I am where you do the kind of academic research that impacts the lives of people directly," says this BITS Pilani alumnus.

By collecting data, GE expects to achieve many more things, and some of them are averting fires, machine breakdowns and air crashes; forecasting natural disasters with much greater accuracy; and so on.

Internet Gets Physical

What's a dream job for Murugappan and others is GE's big bet — not only to sustain its top-of-the-league place in world business, but also to redefine the industrial process.

That's why GE, a $150-billion MNC, has planned an investment of more than $100 billion and hired more than 400 engineers at its San Ramon centre — the project is to develop digital tools to analyse millions of gigabytes of data generated by machines.

In a report it released late last month, the company expects the process it has kick-started — connecting machines to the internet — to generate an additional $15 trillion in global GDP by 2030 by helping to trim costs and wastages. GE calls it the "industrial internet", to drive home the difference with consumer internet where people, not machines, are connected to the World Wide Web.

In fact, we are already seeing the impact of industrial internet, says Chris Murphy, editor, InformationWeek: "This is real technology that companies are using today, not science fiction."

He goes on: "We're calling it more broadly the internet of things... look at John Deere Tractors that lets a dealer remotely diagnose problems using sensors on the vehicle tied to a wireless link. Union Pacific railroad has sensors on its tracks that take 20 million readings a day to predict when a wheel is at risk of failing. Vail Ski Resort has RFID [radio frequency identification] tickets that track skiers and let them know how many vertical feet they covered in a day," he explains.