While the rest of us were hunkering down, preparing for a storm of New Year’s Eve festivities/horrible seasonal weather, PTC was figuratively popping to the shops, clearly having forgot it’s party poppers to bring in the New Year.
It flung into its shopping trolley – alongside the 24 cans of super strength lager, a tub of salted nuts, a loaf of sliced-white, a tin of pineapple chunks, a jar of pickled cocktail onions, a block of cheddar and some cocktail sticks – ThingWorx.
For the princely sum of $112M, PTC has bought a company that, amongst other things, sells software platforms to enable companies to connect devices like fridges to the Internet (the ‘Internet of Things), thus avoiding next year’s last minute supermarket binge, and hopefully adding $10M in revenue in the first 12 months alone.
PTC believes that 80 to 100 per cent 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.
Makes the dithering efforts of other companies around 3D printing look pretty wasted. Or PTC have been hitting the festive tipple a bit hard. Either way, it’s an exciting move.
For example, with an 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.
“All aspects of our strategy to date have centered on helping manufacturing companies transform how they create and service smart, connected products,” said PTC president and CEO Jim Heppelmann while munching on a party-sized sausage roll.
“For manufacturers today, it is clear to us that improved service strategies and service delivery is the near-term ‘killer app’ for the Internet of Things and this opportunity has guided our strategy for some time. With this acquisition, PTC now possesses an innovation platform that will allow us to accelerate how we help our customers capitalize on the market opportunity that the IoT presents.”
