General Electric (GE) announced today plans to open a "Global Software Center" in Silicon Valley with plans to hire 400 software-related staffers to develop what it calls the "Industrial Internet."

When fully operational, this new "nerve center" for software will employ approximately 400 software professionals to speed the pace of innovation, collaboration and commercialization of new technologies, the company said.

This expansion adds to GE's current software portfolio that is part of technologies related to a maker of power plants, jet engines and medical imaging equipment.

GE Vice President Bill Ruh, an executive with more than 25 years of software industry experience, will lead the centralized software initiative.

"For years, GE has used software in its equipment to provide power, to move people and to help physicians see and treat disease," explained Ruh. "Our goal today is to develop a new generation of intelligent systems that can predict and respond to changes. These digital offerings will harness and automatically analyze the petabytes of data that are generated by industrial equipment to help our customers get the most value from their assets. All of this activity will occur on the 'Industrial Internet,' a living network of intelligent machines and systems."

Mark Little, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President at GE, said, "For decades, GE has seamlessly migrated technology from one industry to another. As we look at new opportunities in software, our new center will stimulate even more collaboration across GE and our diverse customer base. On any given day, one of our software experts could be working on a clean energy project, while at the same time contributing to a program that improves the delivery of health care."

Ruh said, "At the San Ramon center, our architects and engineers will collaborate with our global experts from multiple industries to combine our decades of experience with infrastructure equipment and marry them with software solutions."

Design work on the new center is under way with construction of the space beginning later this year. Employees will begin moving into the new center in mid-2012.