OREANDA-NEWS. October 02, 2015. The Industrial Internet is continuously expanding, evolving and increasing in importance, and each year GE hosts its Minds + Machines conference to take an in-depth look at it. This year’s event is this week in San Francisco, where more than a thousand GE customers, developers, thought leaders, partners and media are gathering for focused sessions on what’s happening and what’s next in this growing sector of the Internet of Things. Equinix is excited to be there as a sponsor.

This year, GE Digital, an Equinix customer, is featuring the Predix cloud platform, the first cloud platform created specifically for industrial data and analytics. Predix gives businesses a place to make sense of the data streaming off the connected machines in the Industrial Internet. It’s built to capture and analyze the unique volume, velocity and variety of machine data being generated across industry, and do it in a secure and robust cloud environment.

The GE Predix Cloud won’t resemble anything found in the big cloud data centers built by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, according to a recent InformationWeek article. Instead, it will require a more decentralized strategy, with enough data centers in North America and around the world to capture the data from the world’s largest manufacturing and production systems.

That data gathering and logging needs to be centered on an IT infrastructure that is close to public clouds, large scale storage, in-house processing, compute stacks and network interconnectivity. Equinix is the perfect place for all of that to come together with the maximum flexibility. The Internet of Things needs direct, secure interconnection between data sources, enterprises, cloud providers and service providers so the data can be quickly collected, stored and analyzed. Proximity to the systems and people that need the resulting information is also essential for high-performance connectivity.

Equinix operates 105 data centers in 33 markets over five continents and can bring industrial cloud platforms, such as Predix, close to customers almost anywhere. We also host 500-plus cloud providers, and the Equinix Cloud Exchange, which enables customers to connect to multiple cloud services simultaneously through a single port. So we have the cloud density that’s critical to fully exploiting the Internet of Things and the direct connections that ensure that data is secure.

Click the link to learn more about Predix Cloud. And for more information on how GE is working with Equinix, click here to view a recent panel at the Gartner Data Center, Infrastructure & Operations Management Conference, where GE and other Equinix customers discussed how they are transforming their businesses to better meet the demands of today’s trends, such as the Internet of Things.