Supervised and unsupervised learning approaches rapidly map data into a semantic model that can be used in an IT architecture. GE Digital's acquisition of Bit Stew Systems, a small startup with about 100 employees, should come as no surprise to those familiar with the challenges of industrial IoT projects. GE's Predix is a major industrial IoT platform that targets sectors such as manufacturing, aviation and energy, with use cases in predicting maintenance and optimizing performance of massive assets, such as multi-million dollar gas pipelines, jet engines, or gas turbines. Bit Stew, based in Vancouver, Canada, has software that uses machine learning algorithms to filter and integrate data from industrial equipment, databases, and control systems, creating a semantic data model for use throughout an IT architecture – from cloud to edge. "Most of our customers maintain 30 connected systems to our platform, and are managing millions of connected devices," Franco Castaldini, vice president of marketing and product management at Bit Stew, told RTInsights.

It turns out GE Digital's acquisition of ServiceMax on Monday and its Meridium buy in September weren't the company's only recent moves to expand its industrial IoT expertise. Two deals for small startups, completed recently and announced on Tuesday, add interesting technologies that should help the company develop new capabilities and help enterprises meet challenges in industrial IoT. Both were announced at GE Digital's Minds Machines conference in San Francisco and didn't come with publicly announced price tags. In mid-October, the company bought Wise.io, a startup that GE says can refine machine-learning algorithms through a process like natural selection. In the industrial world where GE Digital operates, recommendations based on machine learning carry higher stakes than they do on e-commerce sites.