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HUNTSVILLE, AL.—JANUARY 23, 2014—GE Intelligent Platforms today announced the expansion of its facility in Huntsville, Alabama with the formal opening of a new building. Huntsville is a key location for GE Intelligent Platforms, serving the defense and aerospace industries as well as multiple industrial markets. In attendance were Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, Alabama Secretary of Commerce Greg Canfield, Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, Madison County Commissioner Dale Strong and Jody Markopoulos, President and CEO of GE Intelligent Platforms.
The new building creates a Center of Excellence that will be at the heart of GE Intelligent Platforms’ growing systems business, which sees GE delivering the value that is increasingly required by demanding prime contractors, systems integrators and OEMs in defense and other industrial industries as those organizations look to focus on their core competencies.
“In the current economic climate, our customers are looking hard at their business model,” said Markopoulos. “They’re looking to eliminate risk, to minimize cost, to shorten time-to-market. Increasingly, they’re turning to GE to provide subsystems rather than board-level products – solutions rather than piece parts. This new Center of Excellence in Huntsville allows us to be even more responsive to our customers’ needs.”
GE’s Huntsville facility is home to 235 employees, including engineering, manufacturing and administrative functions. The expansion allows for consolidation of operations into a single facility housing the designers and developers of GE’s high performance, rugged integrated systems in the same building in which those systems are manufactured and built. Synergies are created to allow for faster, more responsive product development – from prototyping to production - and shorter lead-times for GE’s customers.
Housed in the new building are advanced capabilities for extended testing and analysis of the effects of vibration as well as for examining and implementing innovative cooling technologies. GE is perhaps the most experienced developer of rugged embedded computing solutions in the defense industry, which requires computing that can withstand the rigors of deployment in environments that are subject to extremes of shock, vibration and temperature as well as the ingress of water and contaminants. This expertise is also vital to applications in oil & gas, power and metals industries.
Construction of the new facility – which includes a number of innovative technologies, such as GE’s LED lighting, that are designed to make the building more environmentally friendly - began in March 2013, and first systems shipments took place at the end of the year.
About GE Intelligent Platforms
GE Intelligent Platforms is a General Electric company, headquartered in Charlottesville, VA and part of GE Energy Management. The company’s work in the Military/Aerospace segment, headquartered in Huntsville, AL, and Towcester, England, provides one of the industry’s broadest ranges of high performance, rugged, SWaP-optimized embedded computing platforms. Backed by programs that provide responsive customer support and minimize long term cost of ownership for multi-year programs, GE’s solutions are designed to help customers minimize program risk and cost, and to speed time-to-market. For more information, visit defense.ge-ip.com.
About GE
GE (NYSE: GE) works on things that matter. The best people and the best technologies taking on the toughest challenges. Finding solutions in energy, health and home, transportation and finance. Building, powering, moving and curing the world. Not just imagining. Doing. GE works. For more information, visit the company's website at www.ge.com.
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For more information, contact:
Ian McMurray, GE Intelligent Platforms
+44 (0) 1327 322821