Immelt, CEO since 2001, built up GE’s capabilities in outfitting its turbines, jet engines, wind farms and medical equipment with data-collecting sensors and a software platform called Predix to analyze it all. The software push by GE is part of a broad movement by industrial producers to create factories, energy plants and vehicles that can sense their own performance and surroundings, cut costsor create new businesses based on that data. Competitors including Germany’s Siemens AG, Switzerland’s ABB Ltd. and France’s Schneider Electric have also been adding software and data-analysis capabilities to their machinery. Technology companies including IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com are also applying their software to manufacturing and transportation applications, opening new rivalries. GE has about 20,000 software engineers working on its software in the energy, aviation, healthcare equipment, and oil and gas industries. Instead of simply trying to sell service contracts with an offshore wind turbine for example, GE can now offer customers a digital model of the turbines it sells so their buyers can manage fleets based on location, performance, and weather conditions, Mark Hutchinson, GE’s CEO for Europe, said in a recent interview. Bill Ruh, the CEO of GE Digital, the company’s software and industrial internet division, said digitizing industrial operations would constitute a $200 billion market by 2020. “As the price of their product declines, companies are looking for efficiency,” he said in an interview. GE doesn’t plan to scale back its software push under its new CEO, vice chair Beth Comstock said in Berlin. source: Bloomberg technology