 Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in San Francisco, of Pier 48 at the GE Mines and Machines Conference. It's their fifth year they've been doing it. It's bigger than ever, 3,000 people. Pretty much the who's who of GE. If you need to network with anyone at GE, you should get up to San Francisco before the end of the day tomorrow. But we're really excited to be here. It's the first time we've really come, and as advertised, Beth Comstock just stopped by. You know, there's a lot going on. But the man who's up next needs no introduction. He only goes by one name. There's Bono, there's Cher, and then there's Hima Makalau. Thanks for joining us. Good to see you. Awesome, thanks for being here. Absolutely, so we last caught up about, we were talking about six months ago, at GE predicts transform, 1700 developers, just went GA, five months have passed, six months have passed. What's happened in the last little while? Actually it was Feb 28th or so when we went GA. We talked in August, transformed. That was our first developer conference. And we went from 1,000 to almost 19,000 developers. How many, 1,000 to what number? 19,000. 19,000, that's pretty steep, right up to the right. Yeah, and so we went from pretty much zero partners to around 250 partners. We went from zero applications to really big three applications. So the growth has been tremendous. I've always said this, a platform is nothing without its partners. And so we've had a lot of the partners come help that, fill that gap with the platform and sort of take the platform to the next level. But it's hard to start a platform. You need the apps to start a, nobody ever just goes and buys a platform or participates in a platform and it's a competitive world for the developers. But as Jeff Emel said in the keynote tonight for this morning, you guys are all in. He said he's in it to win it. And clearly the numbers support that statement. I think the key is no platform has succeeded without its applications. And we talked about this last time. For the industrial customers, the technology doesn't matter. What matters to them is the outcomes, right? And so for them, it's like, how do I get to the outcome faster? And so we have sort of invested in asset performance management. We acquired a company called yesterday, ServiceMax, Field Service Automation. It's a key part of how we offer services to our customers, right? We sell assets and we do maintenance on them. Field Service is a big part of that. And so we acquired the company that enables those applications, gives the applications to the customers to manage their field service tasks much better. And then the last sort of application category is digital thread or brilliant manufacturing. All these assets get made in a manufacturing plan. How do you increase the productivity of that manufacturing plan? That's an area we've invested in. So you can think of these three pillars, asset performance management, the digital thread or brilliant manufacturing, and field service are the applications that ride on top of the platform that accelerate the development and outcomes to the customer. But I think what's really powerful in the platform statement is that you recognize, you guys have a long history, you're very good at what you do, but you don't have all the smartest people in the room inside your four walls. So to open up the platform to partner ecosystem, whether that's developers, whether that's partner companies, whether that's competitors, whether it's third party analytics, is really a statement that we see the bigger picture. It's not just about GE and what GE does. I think Bill made this statement earlier today. The incumbents in the software space are going to get hit by just the same in networking companies. The mobile operators got hit by open, open source, extensible platforms. We have the luxury of saying that's our sort of DNA. We're going to build a platform that's going to enable different businesses to come in, partners to come in, and build applications without us doing everything. I throw this number out, and I don't know if it's going to stick. 10% of what the platform is going to be is going to be done by GE. The rest of it will come from 10%. The rest of it has to come from partners, has to come from ISVs, has to come from the system integrators, delivering the applications, has to come from ISVs like ServiceMax and others who are building on top of the platform. Other sort of domains have to be built on the platform. And I think that's where, as we bring in the ecosystem along with us, both ISVs and the SI's and the OEMs, and that sort of extends to the edge of the market also. If you look at it, we talk about the platform as an edge-to-cloud platform. Edge includes sensors, it includes gateways, appliances, and that's where we are partnering with Intel, partnering with HP and so on, and the Dell's, so that we have millions of these gateways that can run the platform. People think of platform as just cloud. A large part of the platform is running in these operational environments, and so being able to create an ecosystem of these manufacturers, OEMs, to run the platform, that is the key. You would have heard the term predict system today, so that's our approach to how do you take all of this and run it in various environments that the customers are comfortable with? So how far are you on that journey to only being 10%? Assuming it was all you day one, or maybe it wasn't all you day one when you went GA nine months ago? I need my job for a long time, so we're going to do this one. Still make it and make it your way. So we're going to, I think when I said the 10% we're going to continue to contribute to that key part of the platform. There's going to be a lot of layers that surround it, which will continue to do acquisitions, will continue to partner with ISVs, but building a cloud platform, building a platform is a multi-year journey. That's what I tell my customers, right? Don't think today you're going to have everything that you need. You got to step on, and this is what Bill says, right? The digital transformation is a journey. You don't get done on day one. So step on the train, continue to work with us. It's a collaboration, it's not a customer relationship. Beth also said that same thing. That's what I was looking at my nose. Beth's phrase was in the emergent era, which I just loved this morning, that get comfortable with uncomfortable. We're not there, we'll never be there. We have a thing inside that we talk about. We're always here, we always want to go there. It's kind of like the mirage on the freeway, right? It just keeps moving as you keep moving. All of us have to be on the train. We all go together. And then, I think Beth also said this, right? It's also a cultural change for all the customers and for us. It's no longer leadership hierarchical. It's about collaborative. It's about a bottom up style. And so that's the big part of this cloud movement. It's a big part of this platform movement. Yeah, I think she said, you know, organize around information flows instead of a hierarchical. And it was interesting too, I think when Jeff said, you know, put good people in positions to execute and really to change a management style. And it's a 130 year old company, but clearly there's a huge investment. And the leadership is all in. And if you don't have the leadership in, then, you know, it's just kind of words on a slide. I think that's the key about this. You know, one thing that's been amazing to me was someone asked me, one thing that you've been surprised at with GE, it's the buy-in that we have from the leadership, right? When Jeff is all in in this, right? And not just from a technology, not from what we do as investment. It's also about the culture. He always says this, right? This next generation is about doers, not just leaders, right? If you look at traditional industrial companies, it all starts and stops with the leaders. But now it's the doers, and that's what he said. The people who do it are more important or as important as the leaders who do it. Right, but it's funny, the parallel, because it predicts is a cloud, even though it's a cloud edge, we do a lot of stuff with Amazon on the public cloud on the consumer side and the enterprise side. And Andy Jassy is quietly underneath Jeff's guidance there, building, you know, one of the most successful software companies of all time. And so for Jeff, I'm out here to say that GE wants to be a top 10 software company by 2020. I hadn't heard that before. Maybe I haven't been paying attention to the, to the quarterly calls, but that's a pretty bold statement for a huge big iron, industrial, planes, trains, and automobiles company. You know, I got goosebumps today when I read one of the press releases that talked about Exelon partnering with Power, does an enterprise software license deal with predicts. That's like the story of traditional software companies. And you know, GE Digital is being talked about in the same context. And so it starts with Jeff, you know, sort of giving the support to drive this change, both technically and culturally, and from a leadership standpoint. I mean, we already are in the top 15 something, but we have said, we compare ourselves to the top cloud companies in the world. The Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, that's who we compare with. We don't compare ourselves with the SAPs and the Oracles. I mean, they're good partners, but that's who we want to be, right? And so it's always, we have that luxury of starting from nothing if I have to say so, at least from a platform standpoint. But with his support from a top down, influencing the leaders to buy it into the digital transformation, buy it into the platform. And a large part of adopting the platform has to come from these applications. You know, that's a hard challenge, right? Every team wants to move at its own pace. So he helped us bring that together. Right. And to be successful the platform and to have partners and to have developers, you have to be attractive to developers. We do close to 100 events a year. And everybody wants the developer. Everybody wants the developer. And you come from some of the classic enterprise IT space, but what you offer is two things that are so appealing to developers today. A, the ability to do open source and do cool technology and work with Docker and work with some of these cool and innovative things. But more importantly, work on big problems, right? And big problems. And you know, it's summed up in what I think is really an interesting television commercials about, you know, this is the place as a software engineer that I can solve really, really big problems. Absolutely. I mean, it's like, someone asked me, why do you work here? It's like working on things that matter, working on things that make a big impact. And so one thing that the developers who I talked to, I was, I think you and I exchanged, had a conversation about this. I did a keynote at Facebook's at scale conference. Right. Who would have thought someone from GE Digital of all places would do a keynote at a Facebook conference where there's a lot of developers who are more hacker like and so on, right? But a lot of my engineers when they were at the conference got stopped and were asked like, what is digital about? What is predicts about? Because everyone's curious. How do I work on something that makes a difference? How do I work on things that makes a material impact for health, for power, for energy, for transportation? Right. And that's what we do every day. The use cases we deal with and that's what we give to the developers. That's what we give to the partners. That ability to target use cases, have use cases that they can build on that make that impact. And that's what excites, I don't know if you've seen this, I've seen a difference in what developers look for these days. Right. They want to make something that matters. They want to make something that matters. They want to be able to see it. Yeah. And they want to see it. But I'm curious on the Facebook at scale and for those who haven't been, it's a really geeky. It's a really geeky show. It's hardcore. Why did they invite you? What was your talk and why do you think that they would do that? Because from the outside looking in, it looks like a complete mismatch. Yeah. And I had the same question. Why would you want GE to talk about it? Besides you're a nice guy and you're very ticklish. Yeah. I think the key was, it's all about scale. What they were interested in was, how does GE deal with the scale of the data, the scale of the computation, that we have to enable to our customers. And so they want to understand how are we dealing with the hard challenges, right? And that's what, because if you look at the kinds of problems we deal with, you know, we've talked about this, the jet engine, one gigabyte of data or half terabyte of data. How do you build a data infrastructure? How do you build a compute infrastructure so that the data scientists can deal with that data from multiple flights, multiple airlines and do some outcomes? That's what was exciting to them to understand. How do, how have we been able to solve that problem? And so we are on that journey. You know, we're building that cloud. We're building that edge infrastructure so that we can collect the data at the edge the right way. And that was the message, that was the learnings that they were interested in sort of understanding how we do that. The other thing I think is so interesting in the way you guys parse the buckets of data in so many different ways. We were talking earlier about the digital twins or whether the digital twin is a part. A system, an ecosystem, an entire field, you're collecting data and parsing that in eight ways to Sunday. And that was the other part. One of my, part of the conversation was about industrial machine learning. Machine learning, which is a part, a big part of the digital twin is about the scale. And so that's what was interesting to the audience that to go back to your digital twin, and at the basic of it, it's a combination of the virtual model of the asset, the analytics that can operate on the asset, and the data that's coming from the asset so that you can make some outcomes, right? And so being able to do that at scale and be able to give that ability to the customer so that just like we go to Google and say, find me the closest restaurant that serves Indian food, you should be able to ask that digital twin, when is the last time a particular asset, a locomotive of the same type failed so that I could do predictive maintenance on that? So you can see the parallels in us, a digital twin of us in Google, or a digital twin of us as a shopper in Amazon, we will have the digital twin of the assets in the periodic cloud so that operations folks can ask those questions to extract outcomes, to extract knowledge, and to do that at scale is what is interesting. And the other thing that's fascinating to me is this kind of bifurcation of analysis to the individual and the aggregate, but not the average anymore, right? Everything gets lost in the average, but now you're simultaneously at the individual unit level as well as taking a more macro view where you can get bigger trends. I mean if you look at it right, any enterprise, they want to optimize their individual assets, but they also have multiple of these systems in place so that they can do a macro level optimization. And so that's what, if you look at what they're trying to do with the twins, I don't know, I heard the number 250,000 twins or something, we got to find that out, the exact number, but the amount of data that's there and the amount of questions and intelligence that's there, it's a mind blowing for me. So let's shift gears a little bit because as we talked before, you came on, you weren't able to come this morning because the cloud needs its code, right? You still got to push code, you still got a day job. So in terms of your day job and what you guys are working on, on predicts, what are some of your kind of short term priorities? How is that evolving as you guys are now building a bigger ecosystem? You've got traction in the marketplace. What are some of your priorities? What are some of the things coming up next for you? Absolutely. I think fundamentally just continuing on the digital twin theme, our ability to let create millions of digital twins in the cloud, that's why we're investing a lot in our graph engine, we're investing a lot in the model, standardized models where customers can put their asset definitions. That's a big area because at the end of the day, that's the bread and butter of the platform so that customers can create their twins. The second comes this ability to run the analytics at scale against the data streams that are coming in at high volume, right? And so we're investing a lot in high ingest capabilities in the cloud so that these gateways that are running in the edge can put in a lot of data. All right, Spark and that kind of stuff. Spark and Kafka and those kinds of things. And then we're investing a lot in being able to truly be an edge to cloud platform where you can write these analytics and move them using Docker, using various container mechanisms in the edge. And so we're building the ability, we have an edge SDK called the machine where you can deploy these applications and analytics in the edge and you can manage this topology in the cloud. And then finally tying all of this security, cyber security, ensuring that your devices are secure, your network is secure, your cloud is secure. So we're investing a lot in the security front. So you're a busy guy. Yeah, like you said, right? The cloud doesn't wait for mines and machines. All right, well, Hima, I appreciate you stopping by and let's get back. You got to go push some more code probably. Tomorrow's the new day, right? The sun comes up again. But really appreciate you stopping by. Thanks a lot, it was always fun talking to you. Absolutely, so you see, mom, Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at G-Mines and Machines at Pier 48. Thanks for watching. Thanks, man.