Summary Bullets:
- LiveWorx brings together a meaningful slice of the IoT ecosystem and boosts momentum for PTC’s role in empowering the market.
- Cisco’s stats from Monday on the high percentage of IoT project failures splashed cold water on the industry, but PTC is not letting this impact momentum.
PTC’s LiveWorx, still in progress, is an annual lovefest for the IoT industry, with the additional benefit (to PTC) of boosting/cementing its already strong presence within the industrial IoT sector. The company’s ThingWorx platform competes with other IoT application enablement platforms, but is strongly differentiated. It is a purpose-built offer for manufacturing and a comprehensive platform that appeals to a growing number of PTC’s installed base which use its other offerings, including its CAD (Creo) tool and its Product Lifecycle Manufacturing and Service Management software. This year, the event was fortified by a major new release of the platform, ThingWorx 8, which adds enhanced platform capabilities and role-specific applications for engineering and manufacturing, along with new partners, more expansive educational programs, and a new collection of service offerings for customers and partners.
The diverse program of presentations at the event covered ThingWorx capabilities along with an array of key topics such as digital transformation, IoT security, augmented reality/virtual reality, blockchain, Industry 4.0, and companies illustrating deployments across different verticals. PTC partners and sponsors at the exhibit hall included consultants, software designers, IoT solution providers of all shapes and sizes, and even platform vendors with complementary solutions.
PTC notes that it its IoT offerings are doing very well, justifying investments that include millions of dollars’ worth of acquisitions to enhance and differentiate its platform. Its Navigate product, launched earlier this year, which provides contextual, up-to-date, accurate product data from systems of record to feed into IoT projects, is the most successful product in its history in terms of early adoption and growth.
But, this was also a week in which Cisco released a study that implied weakness in the IoT sector. Its survey showed that 60% of IoT initiatives stall at the proof-of-concept stage, only 26% of companies have had an IoT initiative that they considered a complete success, and a third of all completed projects were not considered a success. Many in the industry have reacted to this study, acknowledging that IoT adoption does have a number of obstacles. GlobalData also recently completed a study showing that 57% of those companies that abandoned projects midstream did so during the investigation stage, due mostly to higher costs to deploy and maintain the solution than anticipated.
While these findings are somewhat disturbing, PTC and the larger IoT ecosystem carry on, confident that obstacles to successful deployments are temporary and there is massive upside potential in connecting products and machines (and cars, appliances, and anything else that can be connected) to derive meaningful insights and to help transform companies and industries. In fact, companies like PTC and Cisco are at the forefront of ensuring IoT is a success.
IT Connection 