PTC’s second big IoT acquisition sees it pushing to lead the sector
PTC has announced its forthcoming acquisition of Axeda, an Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity provider that offers companies a secure way to connect their products to the cloud.
Teamed up with its take over of ThingWorx in December of 2013, in PTC’s own words, it signals how serious they are about offering solutions for closed-loop lifecycle management and enabling the design of products for IoT use.
Core to Axeda’s technology is secure connectivity and remotely monitoring and management of a wide range of machines, sensors, and devices.
What Axeda does, in a pretty picture
The Axeda Machine Cloud Service includes machine-to-machine (M2M) and IoT connectivity services, software agents, and toolkits that enable companies to connect their products to the cloud using virtually any communication channel (e.g. cellular networks, the Internet, WiFi, or satellite). An end-to-end security strategy covers all levels of the IoT technology stack, including network, application, user, and data security.
This is set to complement the ThingWorx application development environment by allowing companies to establish the secure product clouds that can connect to its products.
From this it can serve as a platform for ThingWorx applications to monitor, control, optimise, and even automate individual products or fleets of products.
It’s cost PTC approximately $170m in cash, which added to the $112m that ThingWorx cost, although the company is still sold on the notion that 80 to 100 per cent of all manufacturing could be using IoT applications by the end of the year, leading to potential economic impact of $900 billion to $2.3 trillion, largely from productivity gains.
“The world we live in is changing around us, and the pace of that change is accelerating as more and more machines, sensors, and products connect via the Internet to their makers, to their operators, and to each other,” said PTC president and CEO Jim Heppelmann, high-fiving his new markets manager.
“In recent years, products have become tremendous sources of intelligence as they have been increasingly instrumented with sensors. Until now, manufacturers have been constrained in their ability to securely collect that data and make sense of it all. Axeda’s innovative approach to machine connectivity delivers exactly what manufacturers need to capitalize on the massive amounts of data now available from their smart, connected products.”
