Saudi Aramco: The Future of Oil and Gas - GineersNow Petroleum Saudi Aramco, The Future of Oil & Gas Industry | Page 31

The GE Difference:
The Predix-Engineering Nexus
It is no surprise that GE is stepping up to
lead the world through the industrial Internet
age, with its wealth of industrial domain
knowledge, its fabled history of innovation and
determination.
“For you to make any meaningful insights out
of the data that you store and capture, and
to know what software analytics you need
to develop and to draw sound decisions,
you need the technical domain expertise of
engineers,” says Boufarah. “For example, if
you are receiving data from a compressor
offshore platform, and you want to compare
the same compressor with the best-in-class
compressors in other parts of the world,
domain expertise will be required from deep
technical compression experts. So engineers
are going to continue to play a major, rather a
more significant, role in the business.”
This marriage between a proprietary industrial
Internet platform and immense engineering
domain expertise is, in Boufarah’s opinion,
what differentiates GE from the other players in
the Internet market, and what will catalyze the
continuous development of Predix. “Today we
have close to 20,000 developers coding apps
on this platform. By 2020, we expect to have
around 100,000. The reason why developers
are interested in coding apps for Predix is
that it applies across all of GE’s infrastructure
business: aviation, power, healthcare, oil &
gas and energy connections. That is a unique
technical advantage that we bring in terms of
the open architecture platform.”
No More Perfect Time than Now
With oil trading at USD 50 a barrel, Boufarah
believes that there is no more perfect time
for industries, like oil & gas, to embrace
digital transformation than now. As the
consumer Internet bridges millions of people,
the industrial Internet will connect billions
of machines to harvest and analyze data
and optimize assets and enterprises. Thus,
industrial Internet technologies, like Predix,
hold the real potential to help industries and
companies learn from their operational history,
take the challenges of today and create
solutions for tomorrow.
Oil & Gas Leaders • April 2017 29