Commentaries & Highlights

 PDF Key takeaways: In 2018, PTC established strategic relationships with Microsoft, ANSYS, and Rockwell Automation to expand its ability to deliver full product lifecycle solutions. The relationship with ANSYS significantly strengthens PTC’s capabilities in simulation and analysis while the Rockwell relationship should deliver greatly expanded shop floor/production integration with their PLM and IoT solutions. PTC continues to build out their ThingWorx IoT platform, which they now term an “Industrial Innovation Platform.” This reflects a deliberate strategy to focus on the smart factory and services as providing the most tangible and value-demonstrating use cases for IoT. PTC consolidated all its augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) solutions under the Vuforia brand. CIMdata attended PTC’s LiveWorx 2018, held in Boston June 17 through 20, 2018. LiveWorx continues to grow as more and more individuals and companies—manufacturers, service and maintenance providers, technology solution developers, systems integrators, consultants, and others—want to learn more about PTC’s expanding product suite

 PDF Key takeaways: Hexagon AB has expanded from their metrology roots to become a major player in the PLM Economy. Their commitment to invest in recent acquisitions like Vero Software and MSC Software is clearly evident and much needed, particularly for MSC Software. Hexagon’s Autonomous Connected Ecosystems (ACE) vision is consistent with digitalization and Industry 4.0 trends that are impacting a wide swath of industrial companies. Their organic offerings and recent acquisitions put them in an excellent position to capitalize on these trends and helping them achieve their ACE vision. Key partnerships with companies like SAP and OSIsoft give them direct access to enterprise and operation technology information that is vital to their vision and to maintaining their digital threads over the long life spans of the target products and assets. CIMdata had the pleasure of attending Hexagon Live 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 12-15, 2018. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Hexagon AB began by focusing

 PDF On June 14, 2018, Dassault Systèmes, a leader in the global PLM market, announced they had signed a definitive agreement to acquire a majority stake in Centric Software (Centric), an independent provider of data and process management solutions primarily for the retail, footwear, and apparel (RFA) markets. The announcement provided some interesting details about the notoriously quiet Centric, specifically their 2017 revenues of $61 million, which they claimed was 60% growth over the previous year. Centric has been rumored to be up for sale for the last three years, a common occurrence at private equity funded companies, so their sale was not a complete surprise. Dassault Systèmes has competed in the RFA space for a number of years. Despite some high-profile wins, their offering has struggled to gain traction. In contrast, Centric has been very aggressive in growing their impressive global team of RFA subject matter experts (SMEs) and building their

 PDF PTC and Rockwell Automation, Inc., announced on 11 June 2018 that they have entered into a definitive agreement for a strategic partnership to develop synergies between their respective offerings to help customers transform their physical operations using digital technology. As part of the partnership, Rockwell Automation will make a $1 billion equity investment in PTC. Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation, had revenues of $6.3 billion in 2017. PTC, a PLM leader with 2017 revenues of $1.2 billion, has pursued the Internet of Things (IoT) opportunity more aggressively than their PLM peers. The partnership will leverage both companies’ resources, technologies, industry expertise, and market presence, and will include technical collaboration and joint global go-to-market initiatives. In particular, PTC and Rockwell Automation have agreed to align their respective smart factory technologies, combining PTC’s ThingWorx IoT, Kepware industrial connectivity, and Vuforia augmented reality (AR) platforms with Rockwell Automation’s FactoryTalk MES, FactoryTalk

 PDF Key takeaways: OpenBOM's cloud-enabled solution facilitates a company's digital transformation by sharing data across independent silos. The Bill of Material (BOM) and product configurations are at the core of the product development process and current spreadsheet implementations hold companies back. In today’s highly competitive marketplace, customer demands are driving product developers toward more customizable products. This level of complexity puts pressure on product engineering’s ability to create and manage more multipart product configurations. Central to product development and the processes surrounding manufacturing is the Bill of Material (BOM). Yesterday’s solution of a spreadsheet to capture a product’s BOM and those of its numerous variations is holding many companies back and impacting their bottom lines. The OpenBOM (www.openbom.com) solution of a cloud-enabled BOM bypasses the limitations of a file-based spreadsheet with its ability to support complex configurations across geographically distributed design and manufacturing sites. CIMdata’s targeted research and industry experience strongly upholds this view. Today,