HP Enterprise and GE partner to expand IoT offerings across aerospace, oil, gas, and manufacturing industries; HPE will be preferred vendor for Predix service
Arik Hesseldahl / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
GE built Predix as its own cloud for the 'industrial internet,' announcing Predix Cloud in 2015 and claiming the platform was on pace for $6B in revenue. This deal hands the infrastructure layer to a partner: HPE becomes the preferred vendor running Predix for customers in aerospace, oil and gas, and manufacturing.
For HPE, it extends a playbook already visible in its preferred-cloud alliance with Microsoft's Azure — anchoring enterprise workloads by being the default hardware and services layer beneath someone else's platform.
First-order effects
- GE gets a way to serve industrial customers without owning every rack itself, while HPE locks in preferred-vendor status for Predix deployments across three capital-intensive verticals.
Second-order effects
- Competing industrial-IoT vendors now face a bundled GE software-plus-HPE infrastructure offer, pressuring them to strike similar alliances rather than sell platforms and hardware separately.
Third-order effects
- The structure anticipates where GE actually went: by 2017 it was reported to be cutting costs, retrenching from building its own data centers, and expanding partnerships for Predix — suggesting industrial-software platforms trend toward rented, partner-operated infrastructure instead of vertically owned clouds.
The trend: Industrial-IoT platforms are shifting from company-built clouds to alliance-distributed infrastructure, with hardware vendors like HPE becoming the preferred substrate for other firms' software.