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At the recent GE Minds and Machines Conference in San Francisco, GE and PTC announced their plans to work together to pursue GE's Brilliant Factory initiative. (http://www.ptc.com/about/news-room/press-releases/2015/ge-and-ptc-form-broad-strategic-alliance-to-pursue-brilliant-factory-opportunity) The idea behind the Brilliant Factory is to link design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, distribution and services into one intelligent system. The analysis of data from all these disciplines can be used to improve products and processes within the system.
ARC had the opportunity to be briefed by Jim Heppelman, CEO of PTC, prior to the announcement of this alliance at the Minds and Machines conference. Heppelman pointed out that part of this alliance involved a large order made by GE to deploy PTC's ThingWorx IoT platform across 400 of GE's global manufacturing sites. Heppleman went on to add that this also involved previous partnerships with GE Intelligent Platforms Proficy Plant applications for optimization, and PTC's WindChill MPMLink, a manufacturing application that links engineering BOMs with manufacturing process planning. It wasn't clear just how this earlier partnership fit into this current alliance. But the real impact of this alliance will be the deployment of ThingWorx to develop a connected IoT ecosystem that will support GE's Brilliant factory. This is clearly a big win for PTC and their ThingWorx platform, but overall it appears to be a win-win for both parties.
ThingWorx provides a development platform for application design, runtime, and an intelligence environment to design and build end-to-end IoT ecosystems. With GE committed to converting all of its manufacturing sites to Brilliant Factories of smart connected production systems and supply chains, using ThingWorx to design and build these smart connected factories makes a lot sense. What will be interesting to watch is how GE's Predix analytics application will fit with PTC's Coldlight analytics and machine learning solutions. Most likely, GE will not use Coldlight initially in its Brilliant Factory strategy, but may see some use for it over time. For the time being GE and PTC will work together to certify ThingWorx for the Predix ecosystem.
ARC had the opportunity to be briefed by Jim Heppelman, CEO of PTC, prior to the announcement of this alliance at the Minds and Machines conference. Heppelman pointed out that part of this alliance involved a large order made by GE to deploy PTC's ThingWorx IoT platform across 400 of GE's global manufacturing sites. Heppleman went on to add that this also involved previous partnerships with GE Intelligent Platforms Proficy Plant applications for optimization, and PTC's WindChill MPMLink, a manufacturing application that links engineering BOMs with manufacturing process planning. It wasn't clear just how this earlier partnership fit into this current alliance. But the real impact of this alliance will be the deployment of ThingWorx to develop a connected IoT ecosystem that will support GE's Brilliant factory. This is clearly a big win for PTC and their ThingWorx platform, but overall it appears to be a win-win for both parties.
ThingWorx provides a development platform for application design, runtime, and an intelligence environment to design and build end-to-end IoT ecosystems. With GE committed to converting all of its manufacturing sites to Brilliant Factories of smart connected production systems and supply chains, using ThingWorx to design and build these smart connected factories makes a lot sense. What will be interesting to watch is how GE's Predix analytics application will fit with PTC's Coldlight analytics and machine learning solutions. Most likely, GE will not use Coldlight initially in its Brilliant Factory strategy, but may see some use for it over time. For the time being GE and PTC will work together to certify ThingWorx for the Predix ecosystem.