PTC Named A Leader In IIoT With Thingworx Platform

PTC announced that it has been named a leader in the Industrial IoT software platforms market for its ThingWorx Industrial Innovation Platform, according to a new evaluation from Forrester Research. In the Forrester evaluation, entitled “The Forrester Wave: Industrial IoT Software Platforms, Q3 2018,” PTC was the among the top five highest ranked in the “Current Offering” category and among the top four in the “Strategy” category.

Forrester evaluated the current offering, strategy, and market presence of PTC and 14 other vendors. Each company was evaluated according to a comprehensive set of 24 criteria, grouped into three high-level categories: current offering, strategy, and market presence. Participating vendors all had a significant focus on the industrial domain and its use cases, native support for key industrial protocols, and a strong international presence. Within that context, PTC was named one of the leaders by Forrester.

With few exceptions, the leaders had a public cloud capability, analytics capabilities, and API-led integration. Some companies, such as C3 IoT are focusing on the analytics part of Industrial IoT, while leaving device connection to companies such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, although C3 IoT is a partner of both AWS and Azure.

The following graphic shows how Forrester perceives the industrial IoT platform market based on its criteria:

Regarding PTC’s standing in the evaluation, Forrester noted: “PTC fuses device connectivity strength with augmented reality vision . . . and the company offers rich capabilities spanning design, manufacture, service, and operations, combining these in accessible end-user applications.”

Although it’s been around awhile, and if you don’t know, ThingWorx is the centerpiece of PTC’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology portfolio, and exemplifies PTC’s commitment to IIoT. ThingWorx is comprised of an application development platform, connectivity, machine learning capabilities, augmented reality, and integration with device clouds. These capabilities combine to form a comprehensive IoT technology stack that lets customers securely connect assets, and quickly create applications and experiences for developing innovative products.

According to PTC, over 1,000 companies, including Elisa, Heidelberg, Sysmex America Inc., and Vodafone are using the ThingWorx platform to support their IoT strategies.

ThingWorx IIoT Platform Overview

The report cited partners among “key differentiators,” and PTC has built strategic relationships with several of the companies within the Wave’s Leaders and Strong Performer categories, as well as hundreds of other complementary partners and resellers.

“We are proud to be named a leader in this independent evaluation, and we believe that being included in this Forrester report validates our strategy and market success,” said Iain Michel, general manager, ThingWorx business unit, PTC. “In our view, this recognition is yet another testament to the strength of our innovation platform and the acceptance by companies around the world looking to capitalize on the immense opportunities created by the Industrial Internet of Things.”

In the IoT era, PTC has enabled customers to develop increasingly smart and connected products that can generate value in new ways as streams of real-time operational data are captured, analyzed, and shared to deepen a company’s understanding of its products’ performance, use, and reliability. PTC has used ThingWorx platform to speed the development of IoT applications that support manufacturers’ service strategies, such as predictive maintenance and system monitoring, that complements PTC Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) and extended PTC Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio.

Actually, if you follow PTC’s historical business strategy, the idea of providing increasingly software-controlled products and systems with sensors and connecting them via the internet, in other words, as Machine-to-Machine (M2M) was gaining wider acceptance. It’s no surprise, then, that as IoT became one of the most hyped technology concepts, PTC got into the game.

The Thingworx Platform

PTC also invested heavily in technologies for the closely related SLM area, and with the purchase of ThingWorx, PTC took another step that signaled their commitment to be one of the leading players in the fast-growing IIoT market.

Still this was only a hint as compared to what has come with an exponential growth curve. For example, IoT services are estimated to grow to well over $200 billion this year, and in 2020 Gartner forecasts that 30 billion devices (“things”) will be connected.

These growth forecasts are staggering numbers. And these numbers support PTC’s CEO, Jim Heppelmann’s insistent prognostication that IoT would revolutionize not only product development, but even what is meant by the term “product,” and how it is operated, maintained and upgraded. According to Heppleman, consumers now tend to be more interested in the function and the services we can get out of a product. We don’t have to own the physical object. Product delivery is tipping towards what Heppelmann has called, “Product as a Service.”

It’s no secret that IoT has huge potential for growth, and it’s not surprising that the big industry players continue to formulate comprehensive plans for investments that will give product developers a plethora of new solutions to design for IoT, as well as a good ROI.

Based on my interest on the traditional design side of things, I wondered how ThingWorx interacted with Creo? It turns out that in Creo, Creo Product Insight provides a mechanism for getting data out of ThingWorx into Creo for validating assumptions made during the design process. In other words, Creo Product Insight lets engineers replace assumptions in the design process with facts, bringing usage data back into engineering and connecting it with the original CAD model – its digital twin. Creo Product Insight also helps optimize product sensor strategy and provides secure, custom data streams needed by integrating sensors into the design process.

Thingworx 8

ThingWorx is the purpose-built IoT platform for rapidly creating complete applications for the connected world. Its unique Thing Model framework allows it to integrate with other technologies, including Augmented Reality (ThingWorx Studio) and Industrial Connectivity (Kepware).

The ThingWorx platform is comprised of the following components:

ThingWorx Foundation — connects to all of the ThingWorx components, providing a simplified approach for developers to create comprehensive IoT solutions.

ThingWorx Studio — includes technologies for incorporating Augmented Reality development for developers of IoT solutions.

ThingWorx Utilities — comprehensive set of tools for business users to define, monitor, manage, and optimize the performance of their connected products.

ThingWorx Analytics — enables IoT developers to add real-time pattern and anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and simulation to the solutions they build.

ThingWorx Connectivity — enables robust connectivity between ThingWorx and industrial equipment and applications.

Admittedly, there’s a lot more to it, but I just wanted to provide a simple overview of the components and not necessarily all that they are and can do.

In just a few years, ThingWorx has become probably the most widely-used platform leveraging the Industrial IoT to create smart, connected products, operations, and software. The comprehensive ThingWorx Platform includes modules that provide the functionality, flexibility, and agility for developing and deploying IIoT apps and AR experiences, including industrial connectivity, analytics, application enablement, orchestration, and codeless AR authoring.

While I’ll admit there’s a long way to go, including some major security issues that need to be addressed, PTC has made and continues to make big strides in IoT with each release of ThingWorx and ThingWorx 8 has proven to be another big step in the right direction. As I’ve said in the past, PTC is betting the farm on the success of IoT, and that bet seems to be looking more and more sure with each succeeding year.

COME SEE US AT IMTS!

Speaking of IMTS . . .  Next month at IMTS we will be conducting video interviews at our booth (#237089). If you are interested in recording a video interview, please call me at 719-221-1867 or check our schedule and sign up at the following link: http://alturl.com/77dih

We’ll be there the entire week, so stop by and say hello, as well as enter our drawing to win a Kindle Fire.

Hope to see you in Chicago!

Tags: IIoT, Industrial Internet of Things, PTC, ThingWorx, ThingWorx Industrial Innovation Platform

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2018 at 17:00. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.