new delhi reliance industries is gearing up to enter the software services business and plans to take on indias it giants as the energytotelecom conglomerate taps the growing potential of the industrial internet as a first step ril has tied up with general electrics industrialinternetofthings platform predix and will create applications for itself and then sell those applications to other companies 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 chief technology officer at reliance told et the company will use predix internally first in oilandgas and then in its retail telecom and healthcare businessesril is working on a blueprint for its digital services unit it aims to firm up a plan with ge within the next six months as the manufacturing sector increasingly embraces digital and automation reliance is hoping that this tieup will help it crack a virgin but fast developing opportunity the industrial internet of things opportunity is likely to touch 124 billion by 2021 according to research 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 chouthai said reliances software ambitions though a work in progress right now may duplicate the strategy followed by the other industrial conglomerate ge ge is betting that the predix platform which is the american conglomerates core offering in the software business will become operating system for the industrial internet of things ges predix platform is on track to generate over 7 billion in revenue this year and 15 billion by 2020ges partnership with reliance is also a first for the company the earlier tieups have been with telecom technology and it firms including indias tata consultancy services infosys tech mahindra and lt infotechthis one is particularly different and one we consider special because it the first one that starts with the marriage of two industrial companies ashish bhandari ceo oil gas for ge south asia said billionaire mukesh ambani ledreliance industries has gradually moved from being a purely manufacturing company to a services and technology firm the conglomerate first toyed with the idea of entering the business in the 90s they missed out on the it boom to tcs and infosys and wipro but this 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 in ges tieups with the it services companies the intellectual property for the applications is owned