It’s 2018, and along with being cloud based, virtually every engineering design software company has embraced the inevitability of the Internet of Things (IoT) – some better than others. SOLIDWORKS is no exception, as it announced an add-in with Seebo that will enhance its IoT presence through connected products.
Today’s manufacturers are increasingly turning to IoT to meet strategic business objectives – from improving product resilience and efficiency, to growing sales, and boosting customer satisfaction.
However, the high-rate of stalled and failed IoT initiatives – which, according to a recent Cisco study, account for a whopping 75% – continues to reflect how IoT development remains complicated, expensive, and risky.
Product teams turn to companies like Seebo to visually describe their connected products in a digital model. The Seebo platform then automatically generates the specs, simulations, and analytics to make it happen.
At the SOLIDWORKS World 2018 Conference, Seebo announced a SOLIDWORKS add-in for manufacturers to plan and deliver smart, connected products. As a new certified Gold Partner for SOLIDWORKS, Seebo launched the add-in for SOLIDWORKS users to turn their existing 3D product designs into a visual model of the entire IoT system, and get auto-generated specs, simulations, and analytics to make their products IoT connected.
Seebo and SOLIDWORKS For Planning And Delivering IoT Products
The Seebo add-in for SOLIDWORKS addresses the pains of planning and delivering IoT products. With Seebo, SOLIDWORKS users are equipped with tools for IoT modeling, simulation, execution, and behavior analytics. This allows them to quickly and easily define, validate, and build IoT products. Once in-market, product teams see exactly how their product is being used and make informed data-driven decisions about product enhancements to boost product adoption and profits.
“Mastering how to design for the Internet of Things will be one of the major challenges for companies in the next 2-3 years,” said Kishore Boyalakuntla, VP of Product Portfolio Management, SOLIDWORKS, Dassault Systèmes. “The Seebo add-in helps users seamlessly turn their existing SOLIDWORKS designs into connected products that drive outstanding customer value.”
Lior Akavia, Seebo Co-Founder and CEO said, “We are excited to be a certified Gold Partner for SOLIDWORKS, making IoT design accessible and simple to the millions of SOLIDWORKS users worldwide. Equipped with the Seebo add-in, users will be able to launch products that stand out from the competition and boost customer satisfaction with innovative capabilities, superior performance, and minimized downtime.”
According to VP of Product Portfolio Management at Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS, Kishore Boyalakuntla, among the leading challenges companies are facing is “mastering how to design for the Internet of Things.”
To address these pains, SOLIDWORKS has teamed up with Seebo to make IoT design accessible to SOLIDWORKS.
With Seebo, SOLIDWORKS users have tools for IoT Modeling, Simulation, Execution, and Behavior Analytics. This allows them to quickly define, validate, and build IoT products. Once in-market, product teams see exactly how their product is being used and make informed data-driven decisions about product enhancements to boost product adoption and profits.
It takes just a few hours for SOLIDWORKS users to turn their existing 3D product designs into a visual model of the entire IoT system on Seebo’s platform. Inside Seebo, users get auto-generated specs, simulations, and behavior analytics to make their products IoT connected.
Lior Akavia, CEO of Seebo, Delivers Keynote Address At SOLIDWORKS WORLD 2018 Announcing The Partnership Between Seebo And SOLIDWORKS
The Seebo add-in for SOLIDWORKS is available in a controlled release, and SOLIDWORKS users can register for a free trial at seebo.com/solidworks.
The spring season seems to be the time of year when many companies and professional organizations hold their annual conferences, and this spring was no exception. I’ve attended several events in the past few weeks and noted striking differences of two of them — divergence at RAPID + TCT 2017 and convergence at LiveWorx 17 — and that’s how I want to wrap up our spring 2017 trade event tour (although I have one more next week).
Divergence at RAPID + TCT 2017
Diverge (dih-vurj, dahy-): Tomove,lie,orextendindifferentdirections fromacommonpoint;branchoff. To turn aside or deviate, as from a path, practice,or plan.
3D printing/additive manufacturing (AM) are about making something digital into something analog. Although the technologies are 30+ years old, many things are still being done as they were in the beginning, such as building 3D models, exporting STL data, etc. However, several aspects of AM are diverging from its historical roots.
For example, the first AM materials were polymers, and they still account for ~85% of all materials used, but metals are coming on strong and now account for about 14% of the materials used. The range of materials being used, though, is constantly increasing — everything from ceramics to composites to food to living tissue.
Panel Discussion at RAPID + TCT 2017
Volume quantities are also diverging from one-offs or small quantities for rapid prototyping to real production quantities where the costs can be justified when costs go down and production speed goes up.
PTC’s user conference in Boston last week (LiveWorx17 ) covered a lot of ground — everything from Creo to Windchill to augmented reality (AR), but the focus of the event was PTC announcing the launch of its newest version of ThingWorx Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) platform – ThingWorx 8. According to the company, with this update, ThingWorx evolves into a more robust, comprehensive industrial IoT (IIoT) technology offering. PTC also announced a new lineup of ThingWorx-powered apps for the manufacturing environment, as well as ThingWorx Studio support for native authoring and publishing of AR experiences for Microsoft HoloLens.
Interestingly, PTC’s VP of Corporate Communications, Jack McAvoy said that two of this year’s three main messages for LiveWorx17 revolved around ThingWorx as more than a platform and the evolving ThingWorx ecosystem through physical/digital convergence.
PTC’s foray into IoT got a big boost about four years ago when it acquired ThingWorx, creators of a platform for building and running applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), for about $112 million. The acquisition of ThingWorx immediately positioned PTC as a major player in the emerging Internet of Things era.
According to a research report, Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy from the McKinsey Global Institute, the Internet of Things has the potential to create economic impact of $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion annually by 2025. The firm believes perhaps 80 to 100 percent of all manufacturing could be using Internet of Things applications by then, leading to potential economic impact of $900 billion to $2.3 trillion, largely from productivity gains. For example, with increasingly sophisticated Internet of Things technologies becoming available, companies can not only track the flow of products or keep track of physical assets, but they can also manage the performance of individual machines and systems.
This week was one giant blur at SOLIDWORKS 2017 in Los Angeles that was witnessed not only by me, but also more than 5,000 attendees. The exhibit floor with over 120 partners opened at the beginning of the Superbowl with TVs and libations all around, so most people were in a good mood by the end of the game, especially if they were a New England Patriots fan.
The theme for this years SOLIDWORKS WORLD was, “The New; The Next; The Never Before,” which was a good idea but was not evident until the third day of the conference exactly what this meant. On the first day, the SOLIDWORKS message was choppy, not cohesive, clear, or coherent as it could/should have been; and some of the presenters didn’t make sense, as there was too much entertainment fluff and not nearly enough technical content that users come for, me included. Why drag AEC and the Dassault Systems 3D Experience platform into a SOLIDWORKS event? After all, this is SOLIDWORKS World, not Dassault Systemes Universe.
SOLIDWORKS WORLD 2017: Entrance to Exhibit Hall
However, things got much better as the conference commenced in earnest with classes and the exhibition floor in full swing.
Some of the biggest announcements from SOLIDWORKS World 2017 follow briefly below. In coming weeks we will cover each of these and others in much more detail based on discussions we had with SOLIDWORKS’ product managers.
Most large PLM companies deal with three groups of people that are necessary for survival – employees, customers, and investors. Every company regards and treats the three groups differently, but most of the successful ones acknowledge the importance of all three – although some companies are better at it than others and some companies regard one or more of the groups as necessary evils.
Each of the groups gets the information it needs to make decisions from different sources, such as press releases, news feeds, whitepapers, eBooks, financial reports, and so on. Financial reports for tech companies are especially interesting not only because of what they say, but what they might imply. And, while some companies try to report “alternative facts,” financial figures don’t lie, and some things are obvious, but there are always numbers subject to speculative interpretation.
That brings me to PTC’s most recent financial report that was made public last week. There were some surprises, some good, some not so good, but in many ways reinforced and reflected the direction of the company, namely IoT. Admittedly, IoT was not the biggest source of revenue for PTC, but it’t clear that it is increasingly important to the health and wealth of the company.
Just about a year ago, PTC received the IoT Innovation Vendor of the Year Award from marketing analytics and consulting firm Compass Intelligence at the 2016 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The Compass Intelligence Annual Awards recognize the best Internet of Things (IoT) products and services offered in the market during the past year.
In the view of the award presenting organization, PTC had become a leading provider of technology that enables its customers to realize the value inherent in the Internet of Things. As well, in their opinion, PTC’s CEO, Jim Heppelmann, had become a major thought leader, having coauthored two seminal HBR articles that describe the implications of the IoT and offering companies a blueprint to get started on their own IoT journeys.
This week PTC announced that it had been named Industrial Internet of Things Company of the Year by IoT Breakthrough, an independent organization dedicated to recognizing IoT products and companies that stand out in the industry. PTC also received the IoT Breakthrough award for “Industrial IoT Solution of the Year” for its Kepware KEPServerEX industrial connectivity software.
Well, it was only a matter of time before what happened last Friday happened. I’m talking about the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) incident on server farms of a key internet firm, Dyn, that repeatedly disrupted access to major websites and online services including Twitter, Netflix,GitHub, and PayPal across the U.S. and Europe last Friday. The White House called the disruption malicious and hacker groups have claimed responsibility, though their assertion is not yet verified.
The event involved multiple denial-of-service (DoS) attacks targeting systems operated by Domain Name System (DNS) provider, Dyn, that rendered major internet platforms and services unavailable to large swaths of North America and Europe.
“The complexity of the attacks is what is making it so difficult for us,” said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer. “What they are actually doing is moving around the world with each attack.”
As a DNS provider, Dyn provides to end-users the service of mapping an Internet domain name—when, for instance, entered into a web browser—to its corresponding IP address. The DDoS attack involved tens of millions of DNS lookup requests from a large number of IP addresses. The activities are believed to involve a botnet coordinated through a large number of IoT devices that had been infected with the Mirai malware.
For the past several years we all have heard the non-stop hype from a number of different sources that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the thing that will change everything and improve our lives in ways that are still unimaginable to us. That may be true, but relatively little attention is paid to the converse – what are some of the not so great things that could result from IoT? This darker side of IoT, of course, includes security, but how about data handling, infrastructure, privacy, and the inevitable question of who actually owns the data generated from and for IoT. All of these issues are problems now and will only continue to grow unless and until they are adequately addressed.
This week I’ll cover IoT data handling and data infrastructure, both critical if the IoT is to proliferate as many vendors hope and hype. (more…)
For the past few years we all have heard a non-stop proclamation from a number of different sources that the Internet of Things (IoT) is the thing that will change everything and improve our lives in ways that are still unimaginable to us. That may be true, but relatively little attention is paid to the other side of the coin – what are some of the not so great things that could result from IoT? This darker side of IoT, of course, includes security, but how about data handling, infrastructure, privacy, and the inevitability of IoT companies going out of business. All of these issues are problems now and will only continue to escalate unless and until adequately addressed.
Believe me, I’m not alone with these concerns.
This time around I’ll cover IoT privacy and company survival. Next week I’ll cover IoT data handling and infrastructure. (more…)
A couple of days ago, the internet of things (IoT) world was rocked with the announcement that the UK’s semiconductor and software design giant, ARM, was being purchased by Japan’s SoftBank in a cash deal for some $32 billion.
In the official acquisition statement, SoftBank says it intends to:
