GE and CEO Jeff Immelt Thinks Apps Are the Future of Industry

Wind turbines and jet engines don’t always make people think of software applications -- unless you’re General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, that is. At GE, the company specializes in big, industrial products like locomotives. But its new product is a little more Silicon Valley: An app store. Immelt said the company plans to launch an app store by the end of 2015 to complement the kinds of industrial products it builds.

These apps won’t look like the consumer apps you’re likely used to, of course, but they’ll offer ways for those in industries tied to manufacturing to better learn from the machinery they use every day. At launch, the store is expected to have close to 5,000 apps, but Immelt expects that number to jump to 500,000 by 2020. The idea is that products that roll out of GE’s manufacturing efforts are full of data just waiting to be collected and then analyzed.