General Electric(s ge), which has touted the potential advantages of applied big data for a few years and last year put its money where its mouth was with a $105 million investment in Pivotal, is now ready to declare that it has started to reap the rewards.

Using Pivotal’s Big Data Suite and EMC’s(s emc) appliances, GE built out its own capability first for its aviation group in 90 days, which then connected up to 25 airline customers to make use of all that data and analytics, according to Bill Ruh, VP of GE Software, the executive spearheading this effort. GE is a leading builder of aircraft engines and a key goal of using machine data and analytics is to provide better predictive maintenance.

“We want to get away from that alarm fatigue mentality,” Ruh (pictured above) said in an interview. “We want to know when a part is likely to break and watch usage patterns to…