The Connector: Meet Joe Salvo, the Man from Digital Future

When Joe Salvo bought his house in Schenectady, NY, in 1986 he purchased a piece of history. GE built it in 1905, not long after Thomas Edison and his compatriots opened the company’s labs and moved manufacturing plants to the city. It was intended to be the model electric home of the future: light bulbs in every room, sewing machines, a toaster, an electric stove and an electric water heater.

Now that the future is here, Salvo is hardly ever home. As GE’s director of the Industrial Internet Consortium (ICC) – a not-for-profit group seeking to bridge the physical and digital industrial worlds – he’s too busy building the “new” future and telling the world about it. “I actually come from the future,” he jokes over the phone from Shanghai, where he was recently speaking. “I’m paid by GE to work in the future and create the things that are going to be transformational.”

He’s only half kidding. In his office at GE Global Research in the Schenectady suburb of Niskayuna, Salvo has a 2015 version of Teddy Roosevelt’s 1905 electric toaster: a dedicated 100-GB-per-second line (compared to regular broadband speeds of 25 megabits per second) that he can expand to a bandwidth of many terabytes per second in preparation of the data flood that will soon arrive.

Salvo is one of the key people in laying the foundations of the Industrial Internet, a topic that attracted hundreds of customers and industry leaders to Dubai for GE’s Minds + Machine conference, which starts on Monday.

For all of its blessings, the regular Internet — the one that allows you to read the paper and watch Game of Thrones online — still has problems, foremost among them, security.

The Industrial Internet, a network that connects machines with each other and the cloud for analysis and then dispatches relevant results to human operators, is a different beast. “This is the network where we are going to put the machines that our lives depend on,” Salvo says.

Companies are constantly looking for ways to make smarter decisions. But that’s getting harder without good data. The Industrial Internet will carry all manner of performance data about heat, noise, and vibrations from sensors attached to all kinds of machines including jet engines, locomotives and oil rigs. It can also connect help optimize entire hospitals, factories and power plants.

Salvo says that thanks to Moore’s law, which states that computing power will double every two years, and Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users – “we now have both the computing power and memory that is required to make really intelligent machines and then connect them to a network.”

“We are moving into a systems age, where complex machines become self-aware and will start to make decisions among themselves,” Salvo says. “If we’re lucky, they will teach us a thing or two.”

This is vintage Salvo. He helped establish the IIC last year. Along with GE, Salvo signed up four other companies as co-founders – Intel, Cisco, AT&T and IBM – and convinced each company to pay an annual fee of $250,000 to kick-start the funding the group needed. The IIC now includes more than 215 members from 24 countries. They include universities and research institutions as well as telecoms and industrial businesses.

Salvo is sometimes the group’s evangelist, sometimes its diplomatic negotiator. Today, members of the IIC are assigned to working groups, testing technologies in special settings called test beds and publishing white papers in an effort to establish the rules of the Industrial Internet.

Salvo says the IIC’s job is to make sure the Industrial Internet will be built on an open architecture where everything is interoperable. This will be important in a future where there will be as many as 50 billion devices connected by 2020 to the Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things.

One such piece of architecture is GE’s cloud-based software platform for the Industrial Internet called Predix. GE has been using the platform internally and in September opened it to outside developers.

Salvo says that GE’s founder would have understood his vision. “Edison based our company on the concept that you build a network and you add all kinds of interesting devices to it that will change the way we live — things like voice recordings, movies, washing machines, stoves and electric motors,” Salvo says. “GE has taken advantage of that network thinking for over 100 years, and the Industrial Internet is the logical extension of that.”