Last week at LiveWorx 2015, PTC made several major product and strategic announcements around the Internet of Things (IoT) and their implications for the future of PTC. A couple of the most prominent of these product announcements were ThingWorx 6.0 and ThingWorx Converge.
Before being acquired by PTC about 18 months ago, ThingWorx realized that making IoT a reality required an ecosystem of complementary technologies that enable “things” to be created, connected, operated, and serviced. With the ecosystem established, applications that capitalize on the data these “things” generate can be developed.
According to Russ Fadal, President & General Manager, ThingWorx, a PTC business, it’s estimated that in 2010 there were approximately 7 billion connected smart devices in the world. That number is expected to be in the neighborhood of 1 trillion by 2035. That’s explosive growth, to say the least!
He said that today IoT is challenged because 80% of resources are dedicated to infrastructure and 20% for applications, and he would like to see those percentages reversed. Other issues that he, PTC, and the IoT industry as a whole are trying to resolve include security, predictable performance, 10X+ faster production and implementation, and what to do with the mountains of data generated by IoT devices. Security is especially important because it is not an event, but an ongoing process that will never go away. No small concerns here, therefore the evolution of the platform ecosystem — ThingWorx.
