Digital transformation
I think that what got us in the door with BMW was not, "Hey, we need a pin for pin replacements of a legacy PLM system!" They said, "No, we are doing a digital transformation of BMW and to transform BMW, we are going to need a new way, for example, to move designs into production, and who has a system that could do that?"
Now it turns out we do. It's Windchill with a bit of ThingWorx processing on top. And that was a great system. I think that our opportunities will come from people taking a fresh look at "What are our needs?" as opposed to "Who has the best version of yesterday system?"
And that's what got us into BMW. I would tell you we are having interesting conversations with numerous other automotive companies who are really stepping back and taking a fresh look at "What really are our needs and our requirements?" And then, "Who in the vendor community is kind of out there thinking in the same way we are?"
I think that's the big advantage for PTC, because I think we are well ahead of our traditional CAD and PLM competitors and thinking about how the world is changing. And again BMW is great evidence to that.
We at PTC had no meaningful incumbency position in BMW whatsoever. We were on the outside looking in, and then there was a need, but we had to co-exist between a couple of other systems -- SAP systems, other PLM systems, legacy systems. And if we couldn’t be open enough to come in there and use our data pipelining techniques and so forth to trade data with other systems but apply our value-add-to along the way, there is no way we can win that business.
But in the end, we are the only company who had both the openness and the functionality to make that work, and that's actually why we rose from standing on the side lines, looking at the building to ultimately closing the order with them.
So I think it's a very interesting time in the industrial world in general and in the automotive business being a very advanced industrial business, we're starting to see some interesting possibilities. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves, but we feel good about things.
Comments