LiveWorx 2018 – Keynote and major PTC announcements

I’m attending PTC LiveWorx industry event in Boston. This year it called “Digital Transformation Conference”. Well… I’m not surprised. Digital transformation looks like a common trend around us as we transform they way we communicate, work, buy and do everything in our life and business these days. Yesterday was the first day, which included keynote and major announcement made by PTC. LiveWorx is growing. This year the event is sold out – 6000 attendees, 200 analyst and press, huge exhibition area. Thanks for Jack McAvoy for this nice summary slide.

To entertain you, I captured a video of walking to backstage of the event in the morning.

Here are few notes and major announcements I captured.

PTC always comes with some funny and interesting name interpretation. Remember last year – IoT is PLM? Here is a thing from this year – PTC stands for Prepare To Change.

Few major announcements were done by Jim Hepplemann and the team. Here is the list of these announcements and few slides I captured.

PTC is creating an agreement for deep partnership and integration between ANSYS with PTC Creo. Ansys simulation in real time will be embedded in Creo and we’ve got a demo of this feature during the keynote.

Partnership with Microsoft, Azure, Dynamics and HoloLens is another interesting thing. Broad partnership allows to PTC to bring lifecycle and data integration features into Microsoft environment.

AR scenario and innovation. PTC demoed few interesting innovation projects shows how AR techniques can be used to for production instruction and assembly training.

Partnership and investment from Rockwell Automation. This one is huge. Rockwell Automation announced their investment of $1B dollars and partnership with PTC. You can read more here. The following picture can give you an idea of what PTC and Rockwell are brewing.

The main message in the event can be explained by the following picture I captured during the product session – Factory of the future. When you think about how all elements of PTC solution can be combined together, factory of the future is in the mindset of what is possible.

What is my conclusion? PTC is transforming in a very interesting form. What seems to be an abandoning of traditional PTC products (Creo and Windchill) and move to IoT, today looks like an extension of traditional PTC market by connecting physical objects and manufacturing experience. I can hear much balanced story from design to engineering, manufacturing, simulation and capturing data from physical products. As it was suggested by multiple analysts and reviewers, PTC is on the way to transform into a industrial platform. But they are not done yet. What we see now is a very interesting work-in-progress. 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. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Disclaimer2: PTC paid for my attendance and some of meals, but didn’t influence the content of the articles.