Joint Intel and Oracle customer GE share about their business transformation. More specifically, CIO of GE’s oil and gas business, Ricardo Cayuela chats with Intel’s Diane Bryant during Day One keynote.
Diane Bryant: I know that GE has been on this journey of digital transformation.
So maybe you can tell the audience a little bit more about that business transformation.
Ricardo Cayuela: Absolutely. As you probably all know, GE has been going on the past few years for a massive business transformation. We are goingto be creating the leading digital industrial company in the world.
To be able to achieve that, we have partnered with companies like Intel and Oracle to create our industrial cloud, Predix.
That is one aspect of the transformation. The second aspect of this transformation is how do you transition from our technology talent from a system [unintelligible] approach where the focus is taking costs out and reducing problems on legacy system, to a system of innovation. We want our technology talent to be focused on extracting value from the software and creating solutions for our customers.
Diane Bryant: Absolutely. I mentioned I was Intel’s CIO for a while. So I knowexactly the pressures that you face. And I know actually how hard it is to drive that kind of change, change of this magnitude. So how did you actually go about tackling this big transformation problem?
Ricardo Cayuela: Yeah. As we progressed to our simplification journey, our destination platforms became a key component of our business operation. So the resilience of those applications is starting to be core to the business. So we had to rethink about how to do that.
We used to have a commodity platform for those applications, and we decided to migrate that to the Exa platform to achieve the resiliency that we were expecting.
Diane Bryant: And you have now consolidated from IBM Power onto Oracle with Intel. Of course, I like that. Maybe you want to tell us about the results that you actually have seen.
Ricardo Cayuela: Exactly. So again, as I said, the initial idea was to make the system scalable and stable. But we end up achieving a 30 percent cost-out through that process. In terms of number of [chips], the number of [chips] got reduced by 90 percent.
The performance of our systems had increased in average 4x, and in certain cases up to 10x. So we decided to put Exa as the standard for that kind of system.
What’s next for GE?
So what we are evaluating now is, of course, cloud. So we have Exa as PaaS as one way to go, and SaaS when possible. We understand that SaaS is not 100 percent there. But we expect by doing PaaS in the cloud, we can take another 30 to 50 percent cost through that process.
So that’s our next step.
