What is PTC Atlas Platform?

I’m continuing to digest PTC LiveWorx event keynotes and presentations. If you missed my earlier blog, please check it out The Race Towards SaaS Future. Today I want to talk about what is PTC Atlas Platform that PTC just announced.

The keynote by Jon Hirschtick, President of PTC SaaS business and Mike Campbell, PTC General Manager of Augmented Reality spoken about SaaS as the architecture of the future. During the past two decades, we have seen a steady growth of SaaS adoption among almost all industries. Engineering, CAD, and PLM application business are probably one of the last industries coming to adopt SaaS.

There are many reasons for SaaS to become a future platform for engineering applications. My favorite pick from the presentation was this one – agility and scalability.

Jon Hirschtick presented the use case for Onshape – a cluttered file-based environment with servers and files.

The demand was to change it and to replace it with the SaaS platform providing scalable data management, collaboration, analytics, and many other important functions.

PTC turns it all into a platform to run multiple applications, where Onshape CAD application is only one of the functions.

The picture is self-explanatory, but you can Vuforia together with Onshape applications on top of the PTC Atlas Platform. Pay attention to customer applications and partner applications on top of the stack.  I will talk about my experience of OpenBOM development embedded into Onshape in a separate blog.

Mike Campbell, presented PTC Vuforia, the business case for front-end workers and user experience.

It was not clear from the presentation of how PTC Atlas and Vuforia are interconnected, so I’m looking for more information. If you know something, please share it.

What is my conclusion?

PTC acquired Onshape seven months ago. I wrote about it in my blog Onshape+PTC=what happened. Onshape is the latest system in CAD and engineering world built from scratch using modern data management technologies, running on Amazon Web Services platforms and multi-tenant allowing unique capabilities for collaboration between users and companies. The strategy of PTC to acquire Onshape technology to build a new SaaS platform for CAD, PLM, and other applications was simple and clear. Two decades of history of building SaaS businesses such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, and others demonstrated that to build the SaaS platform, user experience, and the application takes time. PTC clearly bought a unique technology and experience. PTC Atlas is the next logical step to expand PTC in the SaaS world. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.