PTC Keeps Growing Its IoT Strategy with Kepware Acquisition:
Part Two
by Eugenio Pasqua
The PTC Family Gets Bigger
As we discussed in the first part of this insight, Kepware’s acquisition was just the latest of a series of strategic
moves focused on transforming PTC into a leader of the IoT market. The acquisitions of ThingWorx and Axeda in
2014 have provided PTC with the right set of horizontal tools that, combined with PTC’s PLM and SLM portfolio,
give the company the ability to build a solid IoT offering. In 2015 though, PTC seems to have steered its IoT
strategy with more decision towards the manufacturing sector that has always been the company’s bread and
butter. This second part of the insight will focus on the 2015 moves of the company.
PTC's 2015: Industrial Partnerships and More Acquisitions
PTC’s buying spree has continued through 2015 with the purchase of Kepware, as well as with the previous
acquisition in 2Q of ColdLight, a provider of machine learning and predictive analytics software--for which PTC
paid $105 million–that in PTC’s plans will serve as PTC’s core data analytics platform. In particular, according to
PTC, the combination of the ThingWorx and ColdLight platforms will enable them to rapidly build more advanced
predictive analytics applications to support manufacturers’ service strategies, such as predictive maintenance and
system monitoring, and complement PTC’s existing PLM and SLM solution portfolio.
PTC’s deep-diving into the connected factory sector is further reflected by two important partnerships the company
has entered into this year with two major industrial players:
·
In September, PTC and GE announced a partnership to provide a joint solution for the connected factory, as
part of GE’s own Brilliant Manufacturing Suite. The joint solution leverages ThingWorx’s application enablement
environment, integrating its data integration and visualization capabilities into GE’s solution to provide a clearer
and easier way to visualize and interpret the collected data, and giving higher insights into the whole
manufacturing process. In addition, according to a joint GE-PTC announcement “GE and PTC will align their
respective global manufacturing sales and marketing teams to jointly pursue opportunities worldwide”.
·
In November PTC entered a similar partnership with Bosch for the integration of the ThingWorx Platform
with the Bosch IoT Suite. This is achieved via the Bosch IoT Suite M2M Connector for ThingWorx, a software
extension that allows application developers to easily build applications that leverage the complex and disparate
data sets collected by the Bosch IoT Suite. The solution has been successfully tested in the IIC’s Track and Trace
testbed that was launched in Q1 2015, an application that collects information from wirelessly connected devices
and allows monitoring their status on the fly, optimizing production processes and tool maintenance.
A Major Focus on Manufacturing
All the moves discussed earlier definitively make PTC one of the major players in the broad IoT landscape, with a
particular focus in the manufacturing sector. PTC views the integration of applications with analytics as an
essential part of its IoT proposition, and their acquisitions and partnership in the past two years are a clear
indication of that. The company now has a rich set of tools and capabilities as well as a consistent customer base
that puts PTC in the front row in the race towards IoT leadership. Some may have raised an eyebrow when
looking at the price PTC has paid for these acquisitions (the four acquisitions discussed in this insight sum up to
approximatively $500 million!) but in my view, this is an indication of PTC’s confidence in its ability to realize the
market potential of these technologies.
In particular, manufacturing is considered the sector with the greatest potential for IoT. The use of IoT-based
technologies in industrial plants potentially enables all available information–whether from the plant floor machines
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or along the supply chain–to be captured in real time, made visible at the enterprise level and eventually turned
into actionable insights. Industrial organizations can use this information to improve the performance and the
productivity of their assets (both in terms of machines and personnel) while making a more efficient use of
resources, thus cutting down energy consumption and waste. Equipment maintenance can be further improved
thanks to faster responsiveness to failures and even by planning maintenance and corrective actions before a
failure may take place. In addition, such a wealth of information and higher insight on the organizational processes
enables a better collaboration between the different levels of the organization and an optimization of the
management of the whole supply chain, from product design and engineering to the after-sales services.
ABI Research has estimated that within the industrial sector more than 80% of the operational industrial
automation field-network devices were not Internet-connected in 2014, which represents a huge untapped
potential for the IoT. Being among the players able to capture and analyze the data they produce constitutes a
great opportunity for the manufacturing industry. PTC is well aware of this, and the above mentioned $500 million
the company invested in IoT the past two years represents a considerable bet in this market that the company
seems to be confident to win.
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