IoT yes, CAD, not so much
Dassault Systemes and Autodesk continue to be the only Big 5 CAD vendors to wholesale their software from the multiple servers located who-knows-where (ie, the cloud). Siemens PLM, PTC, and Bentley Systems have little interest, as moving desktop software to servers has been proven to be a long, arduous, painful, and then largely unsuccessful haul.
In his conference call with financial analysts, PTC ceo Jim Heppelmann confirmed his company's lack of urgency of jumping on that particular bandwagon.
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Ken Talanian of Evercore ISI: I was wondering if you could talk about the initial results you're seeing from the Microsoft partnership, how you expect that to evolve and whether there might be some other similar partnerships in the works?
Jim Heppelmann: I think what's exciting is Microsoft sees us as their go to market partner into the industrial world...
Microsoft is seeing PTC contribute a lot of deals into the joint pipeline. And vice versa when they have a customer who wants to take Azure IoT and apply it to an industrial problem maybe integrated with Dynamics maybe not, they tend to now point their customer toward PTC... Microsoft loves what we have and of course we think they have the best device in the HoloLens. So lots of stuff going on there.
It's likely that we will pull PLM and CAD into this, but I'd say not a top priority. We'd like to focus our energy first on IoT and Dynamics and augmented reality, but it's a very exciting partnership...
Now, I don't really need another cloud partner at this point. I'm pretty happy with Microsoft. But of course, we're looking for other partners, we've spoken of our desire for example to have a similar strong partner that might help us in Industrie 4.0 factory automation.
That's a space where in my view we're selling a surprising amount of ThingWorx technology and Vuforia technology, but frankly we could sell a lot more if we had a partner who had a customer base and gave us more credibility and so forth because most people don't think PTC as a provider of factory automation amazing technology. We happen to have a very good product.
So we're definitely looking for partners of all types. But I'd say there's a couple of killer partnerships in industrial world that we really want to have and Microsoft was one of them and industrial automation partner would be a second.
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