GE and Pitney Bowes are partnering on industrial IoT
GE is partnering with American ecommerce solutions provider Pitney Bowes to develop a custom asset performance management (APM) application that analyses the data Pitney Bowes generates from its production mailing and shipping machines to improve the efficiency of its equipment.
Pitney Bowes handles the automated mailing and shipping for clients like banks and retailers, and will work with GE to adapt its Predix software analytics platform to its mail handing and shipping environment.
The platform will allow Pitney Bowes to hoover up data generated from IoT sensors embedded into mail handling equipment and analyse the information to help improve operational efficiency and capacity planning, as well as proactively identify, diagnose and resolve asset service issues “before the client is even aware” of any problems.
“Our partnership with GE will help accelerate Pitney Bowes’ pace of innovation in combining physical and digital solutions to enable commerce. It is an important step in a series of activities we are pursuing across Pitney Bowes as part of our technology strategy,” said said Roger Pilc, chief innovation officer of Pitney Bowes. “By adding this next generation of data analytics and digital solutions to our hardware products, we will be able to drive more valuable solutions and business outcomes for our clients.”
Jason C. Dies, president of Document Messaging Technologies at Pitney Bowes said: “We see this initiative as potentially transformative to our Production Mail business . ”By gathering digital data from production mail machines, Pitney Bowes can drive compelling business outcomes for our clients.”
Both companies have already partnered with one another elsewhere in the IoT ecosystem. Pitney Bowes and GE are members of the Industrial Internet Consortium, a membership group of telcos, research institutes and technology manufacturers formed last year and focused on developing interoperability standards and common architectures to bridge smart devices, machines, mobile devices and the data they create.
The move comes barely a week after GE ramped up its IoT commitments with NTT Docomo. The two companies agreed to combine GE Digital Energy’s MDS Orbit Platform, a wireless router for industrial equipment, and Docomo’s embedded communication module, which will provide remote access and monitoring capabilities, for industrial IoT applications.