Reliance enters into the software industry through GE tie up

By Raaghav G R

Posted on November 24, 2016

Reliance Industry Ltd., India’s Energy and Telecom giant, is getting ready to make a big transition from a purely industrial based company to a digital and software service provider as well, through its tie up with GE’s Internet of Things (IoT) platform, Predix. Reliance in partnership with Predix plans to develop software for itself first and then sell it to other companies. Through this partnership, Reliance plans to compete with existing software giants in India like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL etcetera. “We will be gradually evolving into a software and services firm. Jio is the foundation on which all of this will be leveraged and we will be building up on that. This is a venture that is evolving. GE and Reliance are trying to size up the scale of this”, Manoj Chouthai, CTO at Reliance said. Reliance will use the IoT services provided by Predix, first in oil-and-gas and then in its retail, telecom and healthcare businesses. Read more Partnerships

Reliance will collaborate with Predix to increase its digital footprint over the next six months. This move comes in the wake of the manufacturing sector in India increasingly embracing digitization and automation. Industrial digitization and IoT are processes which are slowly gaining momentum in India. Reliance hopes to tap into this opportunity thorough its tie up with Predix. “They (Reliance Industries Ltd.) missed out on the IT boom to TCS, Infosys and Wipro but this partnership gives them a shot. The industrial internet wave has just started and, given how they have grown Jio, we know that they have the ability to grow a business swiftly”, Pareekh Jain, research vice president at IT consultancy, HFS said. The IoT sector in India is likely to be worth around $124 billion by 2021, according to research done by the firm, IndustryARC Research. “We are moving fast and furious into the industrial internet of things. We want to build an organization that can serve the needs of Reliance and, as the partnership with GE starts to evolve, we want to be in the position of being able to help other companies within India”, Manoj Chouthai said.

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Reliance’s software ambition is only a ‘work in progress’ right now but it is duplicating the digitization and IoT strategy followed by GE. Predix is GE’s core service offered in the software sector. GE is hoping that Predix will become the ‘operating system for the industrial internet of things’ in the near future. Predix has generated U.S. $7 billion revenue this year and is expected to generate U.S. $ 15 billion revenue by 2020. GE’s partnership with Reliance Industries Ltd., is the first of its kind made by both GE and Reliance. “This one is particularly different and one we consider special because it the first one that starts with the marriage of two types of industrial companies”, Ashish Bhandari, CEO of Oil & Gas for GE South Asia, said.

In GE’s tie-ups with the IT services companies, the intellectual property for the applications is owned by the IT firms. That model may not work with the Reliance venture as the two companies will be working far more closely. Reliance Industries Ltd. also plans to assign a dedicated team to handle the partnership with Predix. “What we are bringing is strong process expertise that combines the ability to have nationwide telecommunication infrastructure, secured cloud computing services and at the end we will create a viable solution for what the market will expect”, Manoj Chouthai said.

The Industries in India are becoming increasingly digitized and IoT sector in India is gaining momentum. It is estimated to be worth around $124 billion by 2020. RIL had missed out on the IT boom to software giants like Wipro, Infosys, TCS and HCL but at least with this partnership with Predix, it can tap on the industrial digitization wave and IoT opportunity. Reliance Jio, Reliance Industries Ltd.’s digital mobile data and calling platform will be the foundation upon which the IoT services provided by Predix will be leveraged. Overall this is good strategy and opportunity grasped by Reliance Industries Ltd. Read more on Startup News

Reliance enters into the software industry through GE tie up