LiveWorx 2016: How to stick THINGMODEL in the cloud

I’m attending PTC LiveWox 2016 event these days in Boston. An impressive gathering of ~4000 people sharing and learning about what PTC is doing these days. The Internet of Things (IoT) is enabling a new world of connected possibilities from manufacturing to fashion, enterprise solutions to engineering marvels, all industries and art forms are touched by this awesome technology. Having the ability to leverage the IoT quickly within your organization can give you advantages over your competition.

You might remember one of my articles from January/2016 – How PTC plan to connect PLM to Things. So, LiveWorx 2016 is continues to demonstrate PTC IoT development progress a progress of future PTC IoT development.

The evolution of product goes from simple products to connected product and systems of systems. You can see how this perspective was presented by Jim Hepplemann, PTC CEO. This is another confirmation that nothing in our life is “disconnected” anymore.

Products are mechanical things wrapped into software code and connected to cloud services. This transformation makes a next logical step into connecting physical and virtual product into a single system with an experience powered by new VR / AR technologies.

The thing that caught my special attention and interest is so called – THINGMODEL. PTC is developing so called “active semantic data modeling layer” to model things and events around physical and virtual products. Think about THINGMODEL as an hierarchy of classes, objects, links and events. In other words – bunch of data similar to what PLM was doing with digital model of the product and lifecycle in the past. But… now it is connected to physical products – thanks to cheap sensors and cloud data services.

So, you define THINGMODEL to describe behaviors of your product and “stick it in the cloud”. I guess, the devil is in details, but this is how every product will perform in the connected future.

What is my conclusion? According to PTC, IoT is PLM now. Original product data described a product in design, engineering, manufacturing and maintenance stages. New THINGMODEL is expanded and extended by live connected model of THINGS. I will not be surprised if THINGMODEL will be used as a foundation for future PLM platform development at PTC. Although, I haven’t heard about it… yet. PTC new logo is another confirmation about fundamental shift in the development future PLM / IoT platforms. These are just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain.