IOT fits perfectly in Our Long Term Dynamic strategy

A market leader in CAD, PTC is swiftly moving in where the action is the PLM space. With the Internet of Things taking up a lot of mindspace in the Industry, remotely managed services seems to be the next stop for the company, says Jaishankar Menon, Regional Director – Value Business, Parametric technology (India) Pvt Ltd.

1. PTC is known as a product development and CAD company. What is its focus on India and where is it headed?

PTC started in 1985, so we have been in the business for more than 30 years. We started as a CAD company with our flagship product called ProEngineer, which was one of the first parametric software in the market. We had a pretty long tenure of leadership in the market on that PC based CAD software.

Our products were used by people who are doing product development and innovation. Over time we realised that while product development is strategic, there are a lot of other areas which are important to them. Many of our innovations internally have come, as a vision, from what our customers want. So in that approach, innovation led to areas like product lifecycle management or quality lifecycle management. Large customers like Caterpillar and heavy equipment companies were actually looking at service as a very profitable model and many of them were recognising themselves as service companies. So we moved into this area of service lifecycle management. This means moving from product development and product innovation, to product Lifecycle management ( PLM), and servicing the companies.

2. How do you see the element of connected enterprise changing the support landscape in India?

As I mentioned, as we transform into a truly service company, today’s reality is that with IoT coming in, and a lot of buzz around it, the opportunities it presents to our customers are huge.         In IoT   we provide a platform, and we offer smart connected products. This needs a lot of capabilities- apart from a platform, you need sensors, embedded systems and product cloud, and of course, connectivity. It’s a too complex for a manufacturing company to design.

As a result, there’s a lot of relevance for IT in this business. That is going to transform the products design and service. It will help do things like predict failures by understanding the behaviour of products. I can give you examples where people are using these products in the medical industry where  it is gaining  lot of ground, the energy’s  smart grid and automotive companies are already getting into this is a big way. So servicing these products remotely makes a lot of sense for manufacturing companies. They can not only service optimally but also ensure that breakdowns don’t happen. We are betting very big on this and this is the reason why PTC has made recent acquisitions like ThinkWorks. We are getting into the thought leadership mode of Internet of Things. It’s very relevant for us, and hugely so for our customers.

3. Could you share the Channel strategy and the recent changes to the strategy for channels in India?

At PTC, when we started off, for a long time we were a direct company. Today our product, Pro Engineer is 30 years old. It has moved on to WildFire and today it’s called Creo, which is a whole range of solutions on 3-D modelling software.

Channels are very important for us because at the end of the day, we need them to serve us in the market where we are not there. We need more feet on the street. And for the organisation, channels contribute 50% overall sales.

The plan is for the company is to invest into a whole lot of complex, sophisticated technology where PTC will be directly involved in business development. The products that have reached maturity model, these like Creo, are still our bread and butter.  We see growth in these products being lead by our partner community.

In India, we have grown through our partners and have realized that scale can be achieved only through partner growth. Our investments in partners are very high. We have investment funds for partners and we are the only company, and unique, which has a full fledged channel training department. They ensure the competency and skill levels of partners are built and we do a whole series of trainings on that. So from the partners’ point of view, we have invested a lot. We continue to look at partners to bring value in areas like IoT and lifecycle management, these are highly matured products which require partners of larger size and capability, while we continue to recruit and train partners to get us into the white spaces. This year we intend to add about 20-30% to our existing partner infrastructure. In fact we have invested in what you call a channel account manager, two in fact. It is a big investment, and we believe that is a big job for us. Their job is to ensure the partners are trained, partner hygiene is ensured, partner profitability is built, and partner capabilities continue to excel.

4. How do you see IoT‘s  adoption to Indian enterprise and in what way is your support that is differentiated?

It’s a very new technology; we have made this investment in the past one and a half years. This is the PTC strategy; we have made big bets on IoT. In a recent survey, we actually got 4 of the 8 top prizes which were there. One was for Thought Leadership; one was for our CEO’s propagating the vision of IoT in manufacturing, and the ‘technology itself, the robustness of these technologies.

IoT is a grand plan for us, we are on execution mode and we believe this could really drive the future   and fortunes of PTC in the long run. And the IT strategy is very closely linked with the product strategy. So if you look at sequence of investments we have made and it is the thread, across all these investments which are on these products- CAD, SLM, ALM, PLM. We believe that IoT is an extension because at the end of the day when you have this product information residing on the product,   we can get all this information back through the net. This can help improve the product design for the company, so it’s a very closed loop model, it kind of fits perfectly in our long term strategy.

5. Managed   services on the cloud are where support is headed today. Where does PTC stand on this enterprise technology?

PTC has a serious business in managed services, a unit which has profited for a long time. We have a lot of customers today. And with our choosing managed services they have a choice; they can opt for either acquiring the product or people, or do inherent product design.  But especially in areas like service lifecycle and warranty management, and even PLM, as long as we have rock solid security which we do, the option for the customer to outsource and their infrastructure residing with us.

We also have a subscription model so they can actually subscribe, instead of buying the software. With our  managed services, we continue to give this option to customers. From a price point it helps, specially for our smaller customers who may not be able to invest in the hardware and the software, and specially the people and the talent which is required to drive these successfully, so managed services is really the   opportunity for them.

6. Tell us something about PTC’s CAD products and support?

CAD is still the bread and butter business for us. We have a huge customer base- from aerospace, automotive, industrial and medical equipment. There are different types of support we give. We have e-support, or e learning that customers can buy. It’s an instructions led program where the users can learn on their own on a lot of service related topics. We also have global services within the company. If the customers choose to be trained by PTC personnel, we offer a unique program called Precision learning, which is a learning curriculum designed for the customer. So if he is from a say, farm equipment industry, and he wants to design products for farm equipments, then we can help by assessing the features of the products he needs to focus on. And we do a design process and teach them what is relevant to them. Our channels are also very competent in most cases when we provide the software; the channels support them with   training

We also have something called authorised training centers which are spread across the country. In India we have more than 100 authorised training services, so they train students and designers for CAD and design services. Apart from that,  we donate and offer limited price editions for education institutions like engineering colleges, polytechnics and colleges, we are focusing on that because that’s where we create talent and stimulate it for knowledge. There is a demand which we fulfil through these ATCs and educational institutions. That’s where we build a demand for a parallel pool and usage of products.

7. What is PTC’s roadmap over the next few years?

In terms of technology, we would continue to innovate and come up with new upgrades and updates of CAD products. We have Creo 3.0 which was launched recently and offers a lot of benefits the customers can appreciate.

Through that we are looking at the replacement market also. This means we can replace a lot of competing products. We also have this ability to co-exist with competitors, for customers who are using their products. For CAD, because most of them are only good at the product development or CAD part of it. We are very strong at services part through our PLM, improving the business processes by its usage, the PLM itself has about 30 business processes.

So we are looking at different pieces of the customer and for like a manufacturing company, product development is just one part. There are other areas where we can squeeze profits and provide efficacies.

So for the coming few quarters, consolidation and expansion of our CAD in India is very relevant. Specially for channels, because we need them to drive our flagship product in India, which is CAD. The matured products are being directly dealt with PTC because technically the wherewithal and knowledge to drive these products resides in PTC at this point. Once it reaches a   maturity model, the partners can take it up for fulfilment. For the service space we have had a lot of excitement this last year. We‘ve had some fantastic wins, especially from competitor accounts, where we have been able to co-exists with competitive products; we are in the process s of configuring our IoT strategy with multiple partners. We also see that from a technology perspective we see smart connected products, IoT, service lifecycle as huge drivers for us, and in the near term, in India we see  the growth of CAD is going to be very significant for a couple  of quarters.