Last year around this time, Bit Stew Systems was working to harmonize its data integration and analysis technology with GE’s digital capabilities for the oil and gas market. Not long after GE led a $17.2 million Series B round of funding for Bit Stew last spring, a pilot program launched to integrate Bit Stew’s MIx Core platform with GE Oil & Gas software. GE Digital and Bit Stew have been working together with several large customers ever since to integrate complex sources of unstructured and structured data.
At this year’s GE Minds + Machines, going on this week in San Francisco, GE Digital announced its full acquisition of the little Canadian wunderkind, bringing Bit Stew’s data intelligence to GE’s Predix operating system and other Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platforms.
“We are pleased to welcome Bit Stew to the GE Digital family. The integration of our technologies will provide the Predix platform with a greater capability to integrate data while it is in motion from the edge to the cloud,” said Harel Kodesh, CTO at GE Digital. “This combination will help us to accelerate our industrial offerings, providing customers with contextual understanding of their assets and operations.”
Bit Stew’s MIx Core is designed to handle complex data integration and analysis across connected devices, operational and IT systems, and external sources. It automates the process of data modeling, mapping and ingestion, accelerating time to value for customers, such as BC Hydro, Pacific Gas & Electric and Scottish & Southern Energy, GE noted. The machine intelligence that Bit Stew provides can reduce project costs by an average of 90 percent over traditional approaches.
Bit Stew serves customers primarily in oil and gas, power, aviation and manufacturing industries. “With this acquisition, Bit Stew gains access to GE’s industrial ecosystem, customer base and deep domain expertise,” said Kevin Collins, CEO and co-founder of Bit Stew. “GE’s vision of a software-defined future strongly aligns with Bit Stew’s vision and capabilities, and we are excited about the pivotal role our technology can play in driving the industrial ecosystem forward.”
Continuing its digital transformation
GE Digital also announced its acquisition of Wise.io, another young company that will further accelerate GE’s development of advanced machine learning and data science offerings in the Predix platform. The Wise.io team deepens GE’s machine learning stack and will spearhead innovative solutions in GE’s vertical markets.
Industrial machine learning is an important component of GE’s development of scalable Digital Twin offerings and data-intensive industrial computing challenges. Running on Predix, Digital Twins are virtual versions of an industrial asset—whether a piece of equipment or an entire power plant. Twins continuously collect data from physical and virtual sensors and rely on advanced machine learning techniques to analyze the data to gain insights about performance and operation. Wise.io’s deep machine learning expertise will help to advance GE’s capabilities in this area.
