GE Aviation, Teradata Partner on Data Analytics, Edge Connectivity for Airlines

GE Aviation will become the exclusive provider of Teradata products and services for commercial aviation markets, company officials announced during Farnborough International Airshow in Farnborough, England. The goal is to “provide airlines with wide-ranging operational insights that power impactful business decisions,” officials say.

July 17, 2018

Courtney E. Howard

Officials at GE Aviation in Evandale, Ohio, and Teradata (NYSE:TDC) in Dayton, Ohio, are expanding their partnership to provide airlines with a framework that combines Teradata’s high-performance analytics in the cloud with GE Aviation’s edge-connectivity services. Markets and Markets Research estimates the aviation analytics market is a $2.16 billion industry that will grow to an estimated $4.23 billion by 2021.

GE Aviation will become the exclusive provider of Teradata products and services for commercial aviation markets, company officials announced during Farnborough International Airshow in Farnborough, England. The goal is to “provide airlines with wide-ranging operational insights that power impactful business decisions,” officials say.

"We can provide the best analytic environment for airline customers by adding Teradata's powerful analytic solutions with built-in support for hybrid cloud environments," says John Mansfield, chief digital officer of GE Aviation. "This partnership enables us to bring a holistic framework of enterprise data and business solutions to airlines."

GE Aviation's FlightPulse application will include a connection to Teradata software to enable access to high-performance analytics enterprise-wide, officials say, citing one example. FlightPulse automatically merges complex aircraft data with crew schedules, enabling commercial pilots to visualize personal analytics and conduct their own exploration. Empowered to conduct their own analysis and peer comparisons, pilots discover areas to optimize operations and efficiency, while reducing risk, fuel consumption, and carbon emissions. By combining this operational data with passenger-based data within the Teradata system, an airline can create a holistic enterprise view of its data and extract meaningful business outcomes, officials say.

"Operationalizing the analytics that provide high-impact, trusted business outcomes is one of the hardest things to pull off in an enterprise-scale environment," explains Martyn Etherington, chief marketing officer at Teradata. "The first step is often making sure various data silos can communicate, and our partnership with GE Aviation is designed to make this happen almost automatically for the airline industry. Ensuring that these large, global customers have quick access to a powerful, yet flexible, analytics solution like the Teradata Analytics Platform is the second step."

The Teradata Analytics Platform from Teradata delivers analytic functions and engines, that can be used with multiple data types. Coupled with the tools and languages that each user individually prefers to use, the Teradata Analytics Platform delivers secure, scalable, high-performance analytics in the cloud, on-premises, or both.

For airline customers already using GE Aviation for operations, assets, and network management, adding the Teradata Analytics Platform would deliver enterprise-wide insights with results ranging from improved flight operations and predictive maintenance to increased operational efficiencies and higher customer satisfaction, officials say.

Company officials previously announced their intention to jointly provide products and services, including joint marketing, sales, services, and support across both companies, to specified commercial aviation markets. By combining operations, assets, and networks from GE Aviation with Teradata’s customer information, sales and marketing, and back-office support, it makes the entire ecosystem easier to deploy, scale, and use, officials say. For example, flight disruptions can be actively managed by GE with customer experience being managed by Teradata. With the combined solutions, the process to manage disruptions is more complete by adding information about managing parts inventories, logistics, scheduling, and labor pools. Other powerful business outcomes resulting from the combined solutions range from improving flight operations and predictive maintenance to increased operational efficiencies and higher customer satisfaction, they say.

“For data and analytics, it became clear that Teradata excels at the size and scale required by a global airline,” says Andrew Coleman, chief commercial officer for GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions business. “By integrating our expertise in asset performance management and operations optimization, with Teradata’s ability to drive customer insights using massive amounts of data and multi-genre analytics, the aviation market will gain an analytic solution that delivers comprehensive insights.”

GE Aviation’s Digital Solutions business brings industrial apps powered by Predix , GE’s platform for the Industrial Internet, to the partnership. This edge-to-cloud development platform connects engines, aircraft, and operations before analyzing a continuous data stream to deliver real-time actionable intelligence. Such capabilities are required in the global airline industry, which is dealing with a growing volume of data that could reach many exabytes in a single year. Both technologies are primed for working in a hybrid cloud environment with built-in support for on premises as well as major public cloud vendors.

GE Aviation is part of GE (NYSE:GE), transforming industry with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive, and predictive. With people, services, technology, and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of industry.

Teradata helps companies achieve high-impact business outcomes with a portfolio of cloud-based business analytics solutions, architecture consulting, and big data and analytics technology.

Courtney E. Howard is editorial director and content strategist at SAE International, Aerospace Products Group. Contact her by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .