GE Digital Acquires Meridium

On September 14th, GE Digital announced it acquired asset performance management (APM) software leader, Meridium, Inc. For industry watchers, the announcement was not a total shock given that GE made an initial investment in Meridum in July 2014 for a 26 percent stake in the company. According to the press release, “this acquisition will help GE Digital accelerate its comprehensive APM offering and provide a solution that unifies real-time analytics with reliability-centered maintenance best practices, delivering a complete APM solution”. Including the initial investment, total acquisition price is $495 million. In an interview with Jeremiah Stone, General Manager of GE’s Asset Performance Management business unit and Don Richardson, Meridium Strategic Alliance Director, Stone stated the motive for the acquisition was that customers wanted to accelerate what the partners were already doing. He believes that the complementary nature of the product portfolios will result in the most comprehensive predictive maintenance offering in the marketplace. Richardson expressed Meridium’s desire to continue to service the customer. As an independent software provider, Meridium has experience working in an ecosystem of solution and service partners that Richardson hopes will continue. He further stated that heterogeneous plants need a common APM collector. This is consistent with ARC research findings that end users prefer a unified systems approach to asset management as opposed to point solutions. For its part, GE has been successful integrating significant acquisitions in the automation space into its product portfolio; i.e. Intellution and SmartSignal. The complementary nature of the product portfolios of GE Digital and Meridium is expected to provide operational risk management in a unified system. As partners, they already have a jump on solution integration efforts having launched the jointly developed Production Asset Reliability (PAR) predictive maintenance solution for the oil & gas industry in February 2015. The PAR solution marries GE’s Bently Nevada domain expertise in condition monitoring and diagnostics with Meridium’s in asset strategy and performance management to provide a holistic predictive monitoring solution designed to optimize efficiency through unified processes and decision-making. Expectations are that GE Digital will develop vertical industry specific solutions for other process industries in the near future.