Leading with Purpose: How PTC Helps Industrial Companies Win

At PTC, our entire strategy comes down to three words: Digital Transforms Physical.

To put a finer point on it, our digital technologies are transforming the physical aspects of businesses, things like products, factories, processes, and workforce. We support our customers, largely industrial companies, in their digital transformation; it’s both our purpose and our passion – and it’s more essential than ever.

The pace of change – and the need for innovation – is increasing, as are investments in the digital technologies that enable businesses to be market leaders.

The power of digital has been underscored during the pandemic as businesses continue to face new challenges of health and safety, supply chain, and other disruptions.

Case in point: According to IDC by 2022, 70 percent of global companies will have accelerated their use of digital to transform their business processes, employee productivity, and business resiliency. This shift in strategy toward digital helped businesses not only survive but thrive in turbulent times.

With a heritage of digital innovation spanning more than 35 years, PTC has developed a unique portfolio of digital technologies – CAD, PLM, IIoT, and AR – delivered on-prem, hybrid, and SaaS, to help solve mission-critical challenges for industrial enterprises.

With a strong partner ecosystem, as well as in-house industry and digital transformation expertise, PTC has both the technology and know-how necessary to help our customers identify the best opportunities, deliver value quickly, and scale.

In this post, let’s explore three areas in which PTC uniquely enables our customers in their digital transformation journey.

Move Faster with Digital Thread

Each of our technologies is a powerhouse, consistently recognized as a leader in its respective space. (For example, PTC earned recognition for our Industrial IoT business in 2021 by four different analyst firms.)

What differentiates PTC is the ability for our technologies to work together to realize greater value – faster – for our customers: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts with what we call digital thread.

For industrial companies, a digital thread is used to create a closed loop between digital and physical aspects of the business – and when the digital tools and processes that are utilized across the lifecycle of a product are connected, the knowledge gleaned from one activity can be shared upstream and downstream to inform other activities.

With this continuity of data across departments and functions, there can be greater collaboration to improve the physical products, the physical processes in production, and empower the people who are involved at every step.

Benefits from digital threads can be realized with multiple combinations of our technologies; however, the richer and more contextualized the data that feeds the thread, the more opportunities for value.

>> Learn how companies are closing the loop between the physical and digital with digital thread. <<

The Future Is SaaS

Over the past two decades, the software industry has seen an incredible shift. With the power of the cloud – increased computing power, accessibility, lower cost – software has moved toward a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

However, the field of product development software is far behind most other categories of business software, like ERP and CRM. That’s changing – the hesitations over performance and security are fading, paving a new path for SaaS adoption.

Our technology portfolio reflects the current marketplace dynamic by offering both cloud-native, hybrid, and on-premise solutions.

As we look to the future, we are investing in SaaS because it’s what our customers are telling us they need, sooner rather than later. In 2019, we acquired Onshape, a cloud-native product development platform, and in early 2021, we acquired Arena, a cloud-native PLM platform. These technologies complement our existing technologies and allow us to meet the evolving needs of more customers.

Over the next decade, we believe SaaS will become the dominant deployment methodology for engineering software and, as a result, PTC is accelerating our transition to SaaS for our products over the next few years. PTC Atlas, a robust platform of core services that can be used to power SaaS applications, will provide the foundational architecture across our technology portfolio. Two products have already moved onto this platform: Vuforia Expert Capture and Creo Generative Design.

With this transition, customers gain the benefits of SaaS, including acceleration of product innovation, reduction of total cost of ownership, and increased collaboration opportunities.

Deliver on the Promise of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is not a destination; it’s a commitment to the future of an organization and a necessity for businesses that want to be (or remain) market leaders.

While investment in digital transformation initiatives is increasing, not all projects are meeting expectations. A recent survey revealed there’s a stark difference between the winners and the loser: Programs that beat expectations do so on average by 50 percent, while programs that miss, miss on average by 30 percent.

With PTC technology, our partner ecosystem, and our expertise, our customers are achieving double-digit value in the ways that matter to their companies the most – whether that’s reducing operating costs, maximizing revenue growth, and/or increasing efficiency.

As an example, PTC recently unveiled ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM) to accelerate how companies identify the most valuable manufacturing improvements and enable them to address them with performance insights and enable real-time, closed-loop problem solving. This solution offers a scalable technology to advance digital transformation efforts in and deliver measurable value in the short- and long-term.

>> See how PTC is helping industrial companies realize value with digital transformation. <<

Final Thoughts

At PTC we like to say, we don’t just imagine a better world, we help create it. Supporting companies in their digital transformation industrial enterprises helps them lead in their industries and compete more effectively in a disrupted world. We have world-class solutions to enable transformation today – and we’re preparing for what’s next. Our transition to a SaaS portfolio is just one example.