 Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in San Francisco at the GE Mines and Machines conference, 3,000 people the fifth year of the show. Really everything about GE, all the players from GE are here, but really being driven by GE Digital and the digitization of what was a bunch of stuff. It's still a bunch of stuff, but now we're digitizing it all. I'm really excited to have Ganesh Bell. Saw you, what, nine months ago, six months ago, Time Fly, you're the Chief Digital Officer of GE Power. Welcome, great to see you again. Thank you, thanks for being here. Absolutely, so just first off, impressions of this event, pretty amazing. Yeah, see, it's gotten really big, right? And I remember the stories of people in GE telling me that, hey, this is the fifth one we're doing. The first one, we almost had pulled people to come here. Now we have to figure out, okay, how do I get to a bigger location? Because this is getting mainstream. Everybody is looking at, how does digital help their business? Because in the industrial sector, productivity had slowed down. Right. Over the last four or five years, it had become only 25% of what it used to be. So the biggest lever for productivity, efficiency, and creating new value, is through digital transformation. It's not just automation, it's about creating new value, new revenue from digital assets. And that's why you see the excitement across all of the industries here. And what's interesting, you came from the IT world. Yeah. And there's already kind of been the digital transformation in the IT world, and a lot of the IT stuff has now been turned into electronic assets, right? There's no paper. But that can't happen in the OT world, right? We still got generators, we still got jet engines, you still got physical things, but it's still a digital transformation. So how are those things kind of meshing together? Yeah, so, you know, having worked in software all my career in Silicon Valley, right? It's like, you think about, I came to G with a belief that every business, every industry will be reimagined with software. We've seen it in retail, in music, in entertainment, in travel. But there, the software ate the world. Yes, software is going to eat the world, but here software is transforming the world too, because the physical assets matter, but all of the machines that we make, for example, in power, we make machines that power the world. More than one third of the world's electricity comes from a GE machine, right? So, all of these machines generate electrons, but they also generate a lot of data. More than, you know, two terabytes of data a day from a power plant can be generated. That's more data than more consumers will generate across an entire year on all social media. So, this data matters. We can learn a lot from this data and make these machines efficient, more productive, and kind of like the three sexiest words for some of the industrialists is no unplanned downtime. We can eliminate breakdowns which turns the massive productivity and value for our customers. The thing I think that would surprise most people, Jeff talked about it in his keynote yesterday, is that there has not been kind of the long traditional productivity gains in the industrial machines themselves. And you would think, wow, they've been around for a long time. I would think they would be pretty efficient. But in fact, there's still these huge inefficiency opportunities to take advantage of with software, which is why there's this huge kind of value creation opportunity. Absolutely. And also think about the cycle time of innovation. All of these are mechanical machines. We know with advances in material science and engineering and brilliant manufacturing, we can get more out of the physical asset. But that requires a big upgrade cycle. What if we upgrade the machine with software? And that's really what we did in our businesses across power, where we call them edge applications, where it's about improving the flexibility of a machine or the efficiency of a machine. All of these are modeled in algorithms. And the way to think about it is all of these machines, in fact, outside we have a giant machine that powers this entire event. And you can see the digital twin version of that machine right here on the screen. All that is is it's a virtual representation of that machine from the physical world, where we have all the thermal models, the transient models, the heat models, the performance models all connected. But now we can run the simulation in real time of the operation data and apply algorithms to get more performance out. A great example is we just launched one of the world's most efficient, most flexible gas turbine, a giant turbine called HA. But with the additional software, we were able to improve the efficiency. It's now the Guinness World Record Holder as the most efficient, flexible power plant in the world. Now is that a brand new unit that was developed with the benefit of software or was it really applying a software to an old technology? That was a brand new unit, but overlaid with software, was able to e-couple more efficiency as well. But we're doing this in older power plants as well. In fact, a great story is we had a customer in Italy called A2A, they're a multi utility company in Italy. They have a power plant in Kivazo in Northern Italy. They had shut it down because it was no longer a competitor to operate the power plant in the modern world where there was so much renewables because you had to compete in a market called ancillary services, meaning you need to be able to quickly ramp up power when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine and shut it down right away. You can't do that with giant power plants. What we did was we completely modeled that power plant in software and digital twin. We showed them that this actually can be competitive. So with the additional software, we were able to reopen a power plant that was mothballed and jobs were reinstated and the power plant is actually flexible in the open competitive ancillary services market. So all of this is possible because of software. We're able to breathe new life into big, giant, heavy machines. Right, so just you're in the power space. I'm just, you know, we've seen kind of in the US, you know, the nukes are being turned off. I grew up in Portland with a Trojan on the Columbia River. We used to go take field trips and like the smoke come out the cooling tower. We've got the rise of renewables are really, really, really going crazy. You've got this crazy dynamics in the price of oil. How's that played? How are you guys helping kind of deal with this multimodal? It's interesting here that oil and gas is still its own separate group. I'm like, what do they get it like? Hey, we want to be part of the renewables crew. We wanted to just become energy and not renewables, oil and gas, nuke, et cetera. Yeah, so, you know, that's a great question. The industry is oil and gas has lots of other things in downstream stream and so on. And but at least across all of the electricity businesses we're coming together and we call this the electricity value network. If you think about what we used to think about a value chain where electrons got generated and they traveled to the consumer, it was a linear model. And we know from Silicon Valley when digital enters industries they all become network this model, right? So we're calling this the electricity value network. And the interesting thing is our customers have different mix of fuel, right? In every part of the geography in the world, in North America it's still a good mix. Renewables is on the rise. In California we're going to have 50% power from renewables by 2030. But you still have to balance and optimize a mix of power from, you know, gas and nuclear and other sources of fuel and hydro and steam and so on, right? And in Europe it's over abundance of renewables. They're struggling to integrate them. Into the grid. And over abundance of renewables. Yeah, over abundance of capacity, right? Renewables are growing and so they have to integrate them better. In China and India for example, still coal and steam is the big source of power because that's the fuel they have. They don't have as much gas. So the mix of fuel will change over the world. The beauty of software is we can help optimize the mix. In the past we've always talked about renewables as a silver bullet or gas as a silver bullet. Now we're saying software is your silver bullet. Regardless of the mix of fuel, we can optimize the generation of electrons and we're seeing this entire industry of electricity being transformer and digital. And we call that the electricity value network. Crazy interesting time. So big show, any big announcements happening here at the show? Yeah, we, you know, lots of big announcements. One of the biggest ones is we just downed a big enterprise-wide digital transformation relationship with Exelon. Exelon is the largest utility in North America and they serve over 10 million customers but they also generate a lot of power. Over 35,000 megawatts across nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, gas. And you know, a year and a half ago we started a journey with them on understanding what the value of digital is. They are such a believer and we learned a lot working with them as well. And now they're deploying our predicts platform, the industrial internet platform and APM which is our asset performance management software and our full speed of operations optimization, business optimization and cyber across their entire enterprise. So it's a big strategic agreement with them and what I love to tell people is that, you know, a year and a half ago we were talking about what would happen if a wind farm went digital or a power plant went digital. Now we're talking about what happens an entire utility goes digital or the entire industry of electricity goes digital and leaders like Exelon have the opportunity to create that tipping point in the industry. It does feel like that. This is the moment I think digital transformation of the electricity industry went real. And this is, and I presume not everything that they own is GE equipment. No, software is agnostic, you're right. Right, so this is really a software deal with their existing infrastructure that probably has a blend of GE gear and who knows what other gear that are generating those electrons. Absolutely, this is no different than how we in Silicon Valley would think about an enterprise software deal. It is an enterprise subscription deal for them except it's to our cloud and our edge solutions and it's every machine, right? Every single asset, whether it's a giant gas turbine or a small little pump. Every machine has some sensor. We will sensorize more of this environment but all of that data is being put into predicts. We will build digital twins of their entire power plants and give them more new insights and help them eliminate unplanned downtime and reduce operational costs. Exciting times. We've got to get the long bus, got to get those batteries done, right? So we can store this electricity. We can connect them and optimize them as well. All right, absolutely. We'll get Ashley and I look forward to catching up six months from now and see where you guys are. It's amazing how fast Bill and you and the team have grown from a little itty-bitty, it's kind of software skunk works out there too. I don't know how many people are in San Ramon now. Now, I think we're about 1,800 people, I think. Every time I check in, it's like another 500 people. And we still have great talent, so. Well, we got the ad campaign going on, right? So Owen and Sarah will be there soon. You can hit me up on Twitter at Ganesh Bell if you're interested in working in meaningful purposeful things like energy and the coolest things in software. Super, all right, Ganesh, thanks for stopping by. All right, thank you, Jeff. Good to see you again. All right, Ganesh Bell, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be back with our next segment after this short break.