And Away We Go: 2014 Begins with a M2M App Development Platform Acquisition

Kathryn Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• As Current Analysis forecasted in our December predictions report (see Enterprise Mobility and M2M Predictions for 2014: Growth Industries That Excite the Service Provider Imagination, December 10, 2013), 2014 is expected to be a year that will see consolidation in the M2M market, especially when it comes to the large number of small application development platform (ADP) vendors.
• As the first of such acquisitions in the new year, PTC’s acquisition of ThingWorx is an interesting one; companies not generally thought of as M2M/IoT players are clearly figuring out how to add services and solutions to their portfolios to target or take advantage of the growing market for connected machines.

PTC has long been a prominent provider of solutions to manufacturers, beginning with its industry-leading CAD/CAM software in the ‘80s, which has since evolved to a portfolio for product lifecycle management (PLM), computer-aided design (CAD), application lifecycle management (ALM), supply chain management (SCM) and service lifecycle management (SLM).  As connectivity is becoming an increasingly important part of manufactured goods, it makes sense that PTC would want to integrate solutions to allow its customers to build ‘smart’ machines that can be remotely monitored and serviced and to capture real-time performance data about them to improve their operations.