Reese Takes the Reins at GE Digital
General Electric Co. (NYSE:GE) has named Scott Reese as the new CEO of its software technology business, GE Digital, effective Feb. 22.
Reese formerly served as executive vice president of product development and manufacturing solutions for Autodesk (NASDAQ:ADSK), a California-based software company. He takes over for Patrick Byrne, who will continue as CEO for the onshore wind business at GE Renewable Energy.
GE Digitals main focus is to provide industrial software and services in four markets, including power generation and oil and gas. In announcing the management change, Reese said that GE Digitals mission is to accelerate digital transformations and drive decarbonization efforts with our customers around the world. With global scale and leading technology, GE Digitals growth potential is significant.
Following the news, GEs stock traded down after hours to $100.61 yesterday, a decrease of 2.21%, before rebounding slightly today:
The CEO of GEs global energy business portfolio, Scott Strazik, added, GE Digital is a critical part of the new energy company planned to spin off from GE in 2024... [Reeses] deep software industry experience makes him the ideal fit to partner with our customers and the GE Digital team to accelerate the energy transition.
Recent moves have encouraged many investors. GE Digital announced a week ago the availability of its latest version of Proficy Historian, a best-in-class historian software solution that collects industrial time-series and Alarms and Events (A&E) data to analyze asset and process performance to drive business value. This new version helps to boost large-scale deployments with more enhanced system management and connectivity, value from data with a new Asset Model associated with Historian data, and a significant improvement in collection throughput and encryption, reported Arcweb. It also offers improved system management with a more modern single administrator across the Proficy portfolio that helps to increase productivity. It also provides new capabilities for managing multiple systems from a single pane of glass.
In December, GE Digital entered into an agreement to acquire Opus One Solutions Energy Corporation, a software company that helps electric utilities optimize energy planning, operations and market management. It is hoped that Opus Ones renewable energy planning capabilities combined with GE Digitals network management and optimization portfolio will help utilities make decisions about how to integrate renewables and Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) at scale across the electric grid.
As a result of these and other moves, GE's long-term forecast is more optimistic. The 129-year-old conglomerates decision last November to split into three public companies in order to simplify operations, work down debt and reinvigorate its share price has heartened many on Wall Street. GE has bought back approximately $25 billion in debt, $2 billion more than it had first announced it would, according to Barrons, and repaid about $80 billion in debt between 2018 and 2021.
This article first appeared on GuruFocus.
