General Electric says it plans to hire 400 software architects and engineers to man a new Big Data “nerve center” opening next summer in California. The new practice will focus on developing software to help customers make better use of GE’s products in aviation, utilities, and healthcare, according to the company.

Most of GE’s industrial products already produce, record and transmit significant amounts of machine-generated log data. While the company has long used this data to support product development and customer support, the new software initiative is both an acknowledgment that the company needs to do more to keep up with growing data volumes and an effort to cash in on the burgeoning (and potentially lucrative) Big Data market.

William Ruh, Vice President and Global Technology Director at GE, will oversee the new division. Prior to joining GE in February, Ruh spent nearly seven years at networking giant Cisco Systems and close to three years at Software AG.

“For years, GE has used software in its equipment to provide power, to move people and to help physicians see and treat disease,” said Ruh in a statement. “Our goal today is to develop a new generation of intelligent systems that can predict and respond to changes. These digital offerings will harness and automatically analyze the petabytes of data that are generated by industrial equipment to help our customers get the most value from their assets. All of this activity will occur on the ‘Industrial Internet,’ a living network of intelligent machines and systems.”

Among the industries where GE’s new focus on Big Data could have a significant impact is healthcare, where the company is a major player in the growing electronic medial records (EMR) systems market. Combining and analyzing clinical patient data collected in EMRs with machine-generated data from MRIs and other devices could allow healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat patients, as well as identify the most promising and cost-effective treatment options at a time when spiraling healthcare costs are negatively impacting the nation’s fiscal health.

ServicesANGLE

While software is the delivery mechanism, GE’s new Big Data initiative is, at heart, a strong services play. The idea is to provide value-add Big Data services to its existing industrial product offerings. The move also puts GE in direct competition with IT heavy-weights IBM and Oracle, as well as start-ups like Splunk and Cloudera, all of whom provide software and services aimed at deriving value from large volumes of unstructured, machine-generated data.