 Here's your host, Jeff Brick. Hi, Jeff Brick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground at San Ramon, California at the GE Research Center. They've got 1,200 people here working on all their software projects. It's a pretty interesting use case where it's an integrated center. It crosses all the lines of business, but they came out here where the talent is and we're really excited for our next guest, Ganesh Bell, the Chief Digital Officer, GE Power and Water, welcome. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me on the show and thanks for visiting us. Absolutely. So we love coming out. We got to go visit the lab the last segment, so a lot of cool toys down there, but Power and Water, that's pretty basic infrastructure stuff. So what's happening in the real world? We hear about it all the time, industrial, internet, internet of things, the real world of power and water. Sure, so in Power and Water, our mission's very simple. It's about providing every citizen on the planet with affordable, accessible, sustainable power, reliable power and water, right? So GE solved some of the biggest problems in the world. It's about infrastructure, big, big infrastructure in all of our industries. Healthcare, energy, aviation, transportation, we solved some of the biggest problems in the world. And in the increasing day of where everything's getting software defined, to solve the biggest problems in the world, you have to solve the whole problem. And the whole problem now means hardware, software, services, the full customer solution. And that's why we're doing this thing that we call industrial internet. Yes, it's enabled by technologies like internet of things, big data, cloud and everything, but it's really about solving customer outcomes. And for us, in Power and Water, that means how do you increase efficiency, right? And how do you actually produce more power, use less fuel, and optimize your operations? So there's a lot of examples. We have it across our power industry, where whether it's running gas turbines, for example, if you just save 1% of fuel, just 1% of fuel across the entire gas fleet of GE alone, not just our competition. We can save about $65 billion of customer value over the next 10 years. So when you think about ideas with 1%, right? So those ideas are happening. We've been connecting these machines back to us with our monitoring and diagnostic centers for the last 10 years. And we've got about 10,000 people who do software in GE, but now we're connecting them to the people and the business processes at our customers. And that's really where the value is coming from. Talk about how different that is, because I think a lot of people are confused. They're like, of course these devices have been connected, and of course, there's sensors on all this industrial equipment, and of course people are paying attention and there's diagnostics on maintenance, et cetera. So how's it really different now? What is the promise that everybody's talking about that's so different than where we've been? Yeah, so let's look at a simple example, right? Let's look at a wind farm, for example. We've had sensors on these machines, on wind turbines for a long time. We've collected everything from vibration data, material, temperature, external air, weather data. But we've been collecting this data over a long time just for improving the machine's performance from a design perspective, right? Because we've been collecting, say, 10 minute interval data. Now we can collect 10 second or a second interval data. And the number of sensors we can put on these machines have gone up, because we can do that. In the past, we couldn't do that. In the past, we were collecting this data. You're right, we're always collecting there, but we're using them for how do you make better machines? Now, in the last several years with GE, we've been collecting this data in real time and thinking about how do we optimize the performance of the machine? So we have this idea that we call the digital twin. For every physical asset in the world, we can create a virtual representation of that asset in the cloud. We call that the digital twin. So not digital twin is continuously being enhanced by the real time operational data, so we can actually improve the performance of those machines. And in our wind farms, for example, about we did this two years ago, we had a product called PowerUp. It was just through software, we could improve the performance of a wind farm or wind turbine, actually, a specific wind turbine by 5%. That's 5% more electricity from the same wind all through software and data, and it's been a big success for us. Our customers are using it across our products, and this year, we actually went even bigger. We launched this thing called the digital wind farm, where it's not just about the individual turbine, but across the entire wind farm. And we can now map every single location in a wind farm and build new modular wind turbines, and we connect that to the power of critics and the industrial internet. We can drive about 20% more electricity from the same wind farm. When you look at the life of a wind farm, that's about $50 million over the life of a wind farm, and that turns into huge, our customers market opportunity and value for them. Right, so you can put more on, you can measure more often, but then you can really take the systems approach rather than the individual maintenance, and that's really where the big, big efficiency comes from. Absolutely, so our customers have been asking us, you know, we didn't wake up and say we're going to do software because that's a new market. We've been trying to solve these whole problems. In the past, there was this machine level problems. Now, customers have been asking us to solve enterprise business level problems, reduce my unplanned downtime, right, optimize my operations, and also, how do I take advantage of market data? So for a lot of utilities and energy companies, there is market demand for energy and they have to take advantage of that market pricing. And to do that, they need to know how much can they push their machines, throttle push their machines to be more precise than a gas turbine, which means you're burning through parts, but we can do the economic analysis and tell them, yes, go ahead and throttle push, capture that price in the market, and you can take your planned downtime at a later date or an earlier date, and we can optimize that entire cycle for them. Really about optimization, and optimization that makes sense not necessarily what you think makes sense at that particular moment in time. Absolutely, and you asked the question of what is, why is it today and what is possible? In the past, we've had small set of data, but even the data get went unanalyzed, right? Most of it is what we talk big data and dark data, most of it is dark data, and now you can analyze it. So with all the digital twin and the power of critics, we can do a lot of these what-of scenarios, right? Because we have the ability to continuously keep doing the what-of scenarios and find the right optimization point, whether it's at the asset level or the business operations level or ultimately at the market performance or the business performance level. And on that digital twin, it's not a digital twin of a prototypical turbine. It's that particular turbine with its characteristics, its maintenance history, its nuances. So you're really A-B testing that particular unit, not some hypothetical something that came out of a lab or the fresh pristine thing that came off the factory floor. Yeah, it is when I say digital twin, it's actually the right fingerprint. It's the right fingerprint of that digital twin. And it is something that continues to live on. And it's something that we design day one. When you design a wind farm, you design a digital version of what that wind farm's gonna look like. So it's given birth at that time, but it continues to live on as the wind farm continues to operate. So let's shift gears a little bit. You're a widely veteran of software and enterprise software. Talk about how within software eating the world and we know that trend's coming, that's really changing inside a big old industrial company like GE who we think of as making big things, locomotives and power stations and dams and turbines and airplanes, but really software is a growing, growing, growing important asset within the base. And then to set up this center, 1200 people, everyone together across business units really focusing on software, software, software, heavy duty research and then getting it into the product groups. Sure, my position is actually just that, which is I'm the first ever chief digital officer in GE. And if you think about that, I've been in enterprise software and startups in big companies and when cloud and big data and SaaS and all the stuff is happening, I used to talk about why the next big software company isn't a software company. And people like, what does that mean until Mark Anderson wrote software eats the world? We didn't have great words to say it, right? But it's really about how companies like GE can use software. It's not just software, but software-driven business models, right? So companies like GE can do that. And which is why I came to GE, because if I believe that the industries can be transformed elsewhere, right? That's where you would be. But the industries have to be transformed by somebody who knows the industrials. And that means it's companies like GE who can actually transform the industry. When we talk about digitization, you know, in entertainment, yes, it's happened. In travel, it's happened. In consumer, it's happened. But to transform the industries that GE is in, whether it's transportation or energy, it really takes the domain expertise. It takes the knowledge of the machine. It takes the physics. It takes the operations. And then you combine it with software. We already had software people. And GE, we've had about 10,000 people doing software all the way from the machine in the controls layer. But when we saw the internet of things and cloud and big data, we knew that this requires a purpose-built approach, right, a purpose-built platform to go capture this opportunity and connect it to the connective tissue back to our core machine and industrial expertise. Which is why we set up the center here and we've had great experience, you know, recruiting about 1,200 people in the valley and people want to work on these problems, right? These are more important, bigger problems in the world to go solve. And to some extent, they're more sexy than consumer problems. And you come to GE and you can solve those problems. So let's shift gears a little bit. We cover the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium. We've been there for like three years. It's a great show. And it's a very interesting concept of what is a chief. One of the things that always comes up, what is a chief data officer? What do they do? Who do you report to? What do you think is that role? Is it you're managing it? Are you an advocate for data? What exactly is your role and how are you executing here at GE? So there's two things, right? We always talk about CDOs and there's chief data officers and chief digital officers, right? So I'm the first chief digital officer. So I have the data officer reporting to me for all the power and water. To me, the role of data officer is very simple. It's somebody who looks at data as a strategic asset and looks at all of the possible use cases from the data. We have people in our businesses who look at all of the operational data from our machines, from our customers' operations and look at what are the things we can glean from that? Whether it's when do you plan outage time? How do you illuminate unplanned downtime? How do you increase efficiency and so on? So you look at a lot of those outcomes. When you think about digital officers, you're really thinking about building a digital business or transforming a business into a digital business. And the way I think about it is very simple. Every business, we all go to work to create products and services that we market, sell and engage with our customers. And many industries are more digitally advanced than others, right? And some of the industries like energy are not as digitally advanced as, say, entertainment or travel or so on. So when you look at those industries, you got to look at how do you transform how you work and the products that we build and how we engage with our customers. And in most companies, the digital officer just focuses on marketing and customer engagement and that's a very shallow level definition of it. To me, as a chief digital officer, you are the CEO of the software business. So you're looking at, we were being in the hardware business, we also have a services business, but now we're building software businesses focused around the verticals that we are in in all of the industries. So if you're an industrial, we have a platform for the entire industrial world with critics. If you're an energy in power and water or aviation, we have software to help you run your assets and your operations better. So my role, I think of my role as, my peers are all CEOs of the hardware and the services business. My role, I think of as running the software business for the energy. So it's about digitally transforming one of the largest industrial business in GE, which is power and water. So one of the examples that gets stated all the time, GE always, right, they're always talking about how much data gets thrown off by a turbine engine on a cross country flight. Often cited, data pointed at big data shows. One of the things that comes up is when is the day that GE will not sell, and you can pick the water and power example, not sell the engine, but just sell the transportation and they manage the engine. So really transforming that. So now you're selling transportation as a service, propulsion as a service, thrust as a service, rather than actually selling a piece of metal. I think it's a great question. Every market evolves that way. And we've already had examples like that, right? Which I talked about power up in our wind business. We could have just sold software licenses to power up, but we saw an opportunity where power up was about increasing the output. So we went to customers and sold it as a subscription. Effectively, we sold megawatts as a subscription, if you will, right? So we're seeing that opportunity and that's the big advantage of doing this in the context of industrials is we have the, I would say, the X factor, if you will, to innovate on the business models. So it really is on how customers push us. We are delivering, I would say, outcome as a service, in most cases. Customers care about enterprise level outcomes. So all of those are possible ideas when you really do the digital transformation of a particular industry. I like an outcome as a service. I hadn't heard that one. So Ganesh, thanks for stopping by, interrupting your busy day. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Sandra Mone, California at the GE Research Center. Catch you next time.