PTC has announced that it is to acquire Onshape for approximately $470 million, as the company doubles down on its view of ‘inevitable industry transition to Software as a Service’.
Onshape launched in 2012, with its ‘CAD on the Cloud’ maturing to add data management and collaboration tools to form the first SaaS product development platform, and will contimue to operate as a business unit within PTC, with current management reporting directly to PTC President and CEO Jim Heppelmann.
With 5,000 subscribers using Onshape software globally, PTC’s CEO believes the move will accelerate PTC’s ability to attract new customers.
He said: “The acquisition of Onshape complements our on-premises business with the industry’s only proven, scalable pure SaaS platform, which we expect will open new CAD and PLM growth opportunities while positioning PTC to be the leader as the market transitions toward the SaaS model.”
The transaction is expected to be completed in November 2019.
In the meantime, watch Onshape CEO John Hirschtick’s presentation from DEVELOP3D LIVE earlier this year:
Additionally, you can read our most recent review of Onshape here, which saw it add some serious updates and enhancements, both at its core, with its modelling and drawing creation tools, but also in terms of the size and complexity of organisation it is looking to attract and support.
What we said:
Onshape’s ongoing development and maturation is interesting to watch. The tools themselves for defining, testing and documenting a product are becoming richer as each month passes (and this is something that’s very easy to miss in the rapid-fire monthly release cycle).
At the same time, the infrastructure to support more complex products in Onshape (in terms of traceability, version control and on) and its inherent organisational infrastructure is also maturing nicely.
