PTC, has announced the upcoming release of the latest version of its ThingWorx Industrial IoT platform. Designed to accelerate Industrial IoT deployments across the enterprise value chain, ThingWorx 9.0 will deliver new and expanded features to help industrial companies create, implement, customise, and scale their solutions.
ThingWorx was the first platform that focused exclusively on the industrial market for digital transformation use cases. Since its initial launch, thousands of industrial companies, including discrete product and process manufacturers, have used ThingWorx to successfully optimise business processes, improve manufacturing operations, modernise field service delivery, and more.
ThingWorx is an essential platform for delivering Industrial IoT solutions at scale, across the enterprise, and enables organisations around the world to gain competitive advantage and reduce costs.
ThingWorx 9.0 will deliver advances in several core development areas and introduce many new features and capabilities:
Enhanced scalability and availability
With Industrial IoT central to companies’ digital transformation efforts, ThingWorx 9.0 will introduce a new, optimised clustered configuration that will significantly improve the horizontal scalability and availability of the platform. This improvement will fortify the ability of ThingWorx to scale to vast populations of devices, manage demanding data processing requirements, and support a greater number of application users. Additionally, the clustered configuration will further strengthen ThingWorx deployments for critical operations, systems, services, and assets that need to remain highly available under the most important circumstances.
Accelerated application and solution enablement
Expanding on the platform’s heritage as a standout tool for rapid application enablement, ThingWorx 9.0 will formally introduce solution building blocks. These building blocks are pre-defined, pre-built configurations of connectors, domain models, business logic, and UI elements, which will simplify implementations of the highest-value Industrial IoT use cases, such as status monitoring, digital work instructions, and manufacturing job order management.
Unleashing data models with Microsoft using OPC unified architecture (OPC UA)
PTC and Microsoftshare the vision to drive openness and interoperability in industrial IoT and support the industrial interoperability standard OPC UA. ThingWorx 9.0 will bring seamless integration with OPC UA components that Microsoft contributed to the OPC Foundation, including OPC UA Publisher, OPC UA Twin, and OPC UA Global Discovery Server, offering the ability to deliver intelligence and data richness from the edge to the cloud. OPC UA helps integrate the ThingWorx Kepware connectivity solution and Microsoft Azure with ThingWorx, where data models get automatically standardised for simplified solution enablement.
Analytics advancements
ThingWorx 9.0 will introduce enhanced predictive analytics scoring at the edge to reduce data transmission costs and latency challenges, and improve the accuracy of asset performance predictions. These advantages are important for deployments of ThingWorx at the enterprise level, as these companies rely on the insights from the ThingWorx Analytics solution to improve decision making, optimise operational processes, and reduce unplanned downtime.
Scaling ThingWorx with solution central
ThingWorx 9.0 will simplify the scaling of Industrial IoT deployments across the enterprise with enhancements to the Solution Central tool. Administrators will have access to a broader range of self-service functions for deploying ThingWorx solutions, managing ThingWorx environments, and enabling development team collaboration. Since its introduction in ThingWorx 8.5, Solution Central has been adopted by hundreds of ThingWorx customers and partners that are scaling ThingWorx deployments across their organisations.
“The introduction of ThingWorx 9.0 will mark an important advancement for PTC’s Industrial IoT strategy,” said Joe Biron, divisional general manager and chief technology officer, IoT Segment, PTC. “Our added investments in scalability, solution development, OPC UA support, and stronger analytics are critical as our customers continue to scale their Industrial IoT deployments across the enterprise. These enhancements come at an especially important time, as companies look for new ways to innovate and address challenges from the impact of COVID-19, such as the increased need for remote monitoring, control, and services.”
In addition to strong customer adoption and success, ThingWorx continues to see consistent acknowledgment as a Industrial IoT platform from industry analyst firms. Analysts continue to credit the advancements of ThingWorx as a platform, as well as PTC’s strategic alliances with Rockwell Automation and Microsoft.
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