 Welcome back everyone, live here in San Francisco, California, this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and expect a signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE theCUBE and our next guest here with GE, John Suruji, the North American Sales Director for GE Power Digital. Power is king, power is the world. Without power, we can't exist. Certainly data centers need more power. That's a big part of the scarce resource. Utilities are driving power, obviously it's a huge thing. Welcome to theCUBE. Absolutely, nice intro, I like that. Beth Comstock, who we're big fans of, amazing keynote yesterday. She talked about living in the in between. Yeah, right. In between two worlds now. And it's interesting, I observed, I was on a panel with Jeff M.L. two years ago. I hosted with him at Mines and Machines in Chicago and he had the first early adopters of the industrial cloud guys, United Airlines. And their big app was saved a billion dollars using big data for the petroleum. So you start to see big data and digital helping utilities and power, but that's an old world, right? The old world had certain things, sensors. Now the digital world comes in, it's an IT environment. You're bringing an IT world into the collision. Combine that with old way, new way. You have two worlds colliding and a shift in technology. Right, so I think what you're seeing, and if you take the evolution of mines and machines the last few years, it went from education and telling people kind of here's where things are going. Now I think what you're seeing now is to best point, this living in the in between where you have, you know the old is gone, right? There's nothing you can do about that. And you know kind of where you want to go, but that pathway is not real clear. So this notion of living in the in between is you're going to have to make some assumptions, you're going to have to take some leaps of faith, but you better get on board because that's kind of where things are heading. So I think she hit it right on the head. She talked about empowerment and the understanding of data flow and things like that, but the living in the in between is what I think a lot of people here are going through right now. And you know, you bring up the point about in between. It's also, the clarity certainly causes some tension, but the fog is lifting if you will. You start to see a path, a straight and narrow, some sort, not complete darkness, so it's good stuff there. But also you put the pressure of competitive strategy on this. This is this a lot of opportunity to change the business value of vision. So in addition to the clarity of a shift to a new technology base for efficiency, the effectiveness of the competitive strategy for a business person is like, whoa, everyone's on alarm now. So this is an interesting dynamic. Your thoughts on what you're seeing with your customers. So I think what you're seeing, and I'll go back again to this evolution of minds and machines, and what you're seeing this year is that you have testimonials. You have actual cases where, you know, people are now adopting it, and so that kind of feeds on itself. So people are realizing now that I really need to look into this. They're operationalizing it. Absolutely. That's a key thing. Absolutely. So they're not just sitting on the sidelines. Yeah. They're in there doing it. So the CEO of NYPA spoke yesterday, Gil Kenyones, about what their strategy was to move into this direction. And the unique thing about GE, especially for the utility business, is that we have applications and we have a strategy around the entire electricity value network. Transmission and distribution, renewables, and then our traditional power generation where we've got a strong base. And so he talked a little bit about that and what that strategy is. And so what you're seeing this year is a lot of other utilities take note. And I always say, I've always said from day one with GE and when they coined the industrial cloud, which Wikibon, our research team actually broke the first sizing of that market and we kicked off here in San Francisco that year. And I think Beth was the first time on theCUBE. It was an IoT vision clearly, because you guys have industrial equipment that has not been connected to IT systems. Certainly their own proprietary operational systems, but now you're starting to see the threat of security become a paramount concern because we see like just a pedestrian DDoS attack by manufacturers that don't put the passwords right on the box that causes a whole network to crash. So security now becomes a concern. Yeah, and so it's the underpinning of everything. Because if you look at the sensitivity around a power plant, that's exponentially a bigger deal than some other things, absolutely. Homeland security is all over it? Absolutely, and so what you see in North America, where I have responsibility for is a very high level of sophistication with the utilities. And so then you really look at the bare minimum, you've got to have strong cybersecurity within that platform. John Siruji here with GE, great guest. I want to get your thoughts because you're bringing in a whole nother dimension of concepts in here, which is great, which is, hey, this is like the bread and butter of utilities. It's been around for a long time. Now it's going digital. Operationalizing a paradigm shift is a real interesting conversation. How's it playing well in the field? Because now you have the homeland security, you got big data, you got instrumentation, you got AI right around the corner. This is a major shift. How are people doing it? What are you seeing with customers? How are they instrumenting it? Because they have a five nines mentality. They are operating at a level of the GE, kind of the traditional mindset of GE. Excellence, five nines, always up. Okay, you're going to talk to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, move fast, break stuff. That doesn't how it works in the GE world. You can't move fast and break stuff and the plane crashes. Thoughts? So I think you're seeing healthy friction within GE and healthy friction within our customers. Because what's happened is, traditionally our salespeople focus on operations. We sell turbines. We focus on the power plant operation. We talk about efficiency. Now you're looking at this emergence of the IT standpoint. And so from a salesperson, where you normally would call on a plant manager ahead of operations, now you're also including in that conversation, the digital strategy. So the CIO comes into that discussion. And so the evolution of a salesperson for utilities has really broadened beyond operations into the digital strategy. What's the architecture they have to think about it? Any best practices or is there a playbook for reshaping the architecture by the new IoT landscape? Well I think you start with the plan itself and then how do you capture the data around the plan, around efficiency, and then you can build that platform into predictive analytics. Not just how is it running, but how can you predict issues that may come up and then how can you then further optimize that across the entire fleet, where you get to the point where you can actually, you know, you have enough data on the machines where you can delay an outage where your machines are down and that creates revenue for the utility. So it's a whole different way of thinking where you had a very planned outage situation. And then you get to a point where because of the analytics, you can make changes and really make an impact on the revenue. And you can actually move resources around, just makes total sense. And that's classic big data. And I saw a demo with PTC on augmented reality, serviceability, all kinds of new opportunities. I got to ask you on the customer piece, is there a operational playbook right now, maintaining the five nines, always up operational mindset. Now that IT comes into the mix, is there a friction culturally? I mean, you're starting to see the worlds and what are they doing? And give an example without giving away nines. I know some of the data is confidential. The culture clash between ops and IT, traditionally operational people and IT. And an example of a utility's innovation or scenario that they've done that you can highlight. Yeah, I think what you're seeing is that instead of being out of the way, IT's become much more mainstream and it's become much more a part of the overall strategy of the utility. And so this notion of the digital thread and then how can I not just accommodate efficiencies and thing, but how can I incorporate that into the strategy of the utility is what's emerging right now. And so that seat at the table for where we talk about the efficiency of a turbine also becomes what is that overall digital strategy that we want to have across the entire fleet? So it's not just your traditional power sources, but your renewables, your solar and your wind and the complexities that that creates for utility. John Sarucci here, North American Sales Director for Power Systems Digital for GE. Share it with the folks watching. What's happening at the Show Vibe? I see you're seeing all this convergence of analog, industrial, meets IoT and cloud thoughts on what's happening here. Highlights for you, hallway conversations. What's trending here? So I go back to that living in the in between. I think there's a lot of wow moments. There's a lot of more people are seeing things and saying, that's really great technology. But then you take it back to your workplace and for a utility, where does that fit? So you look at what are the metrics for utility? What's really important? Just what you were talking about, reliability, uptime, all these things that we all take for granted as consumers of a utility. And then you look at these tools and figure out how can that help us achieve what we want to achieve as a utility? Well now the clouds of utility was seen, the public cloud grow, bringing that. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCUBE here, live in San Francisco at General Electric GE, mind and machines, big event, bringing the new and old. Don't get stuck in between, get to digital. Obviously we're pumping everything out, digital is theCUBE. Thanks for watching, I'm John Furrier, be right back.