PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today completed its acquisition of MKS, developer of MKS Integrity®, an industry-leading platform for software application lifecycle management (ALM).
MKS Integrity coordinates and manages all activities and artifacts associated with developing software-intensive products, including requirements, models, code and test, ensuring comprehensive lifecycle traceability. By combining MKS Integrity with PTC’s industry-leading product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions, PTC is reshaping the way manufacturers integrate product hardware and software, enabling them to improve product quality, accelerate time-to-market, and reduce risk and total service costs.
Software has become an integral, embedded component of most manufactured products today – everything from automobiles and medical devices to smart phones and children’s toys. For example, cars rolling off today’s assembly lines include more than 100 million lines of embedded software code and nearly three quarters of all medical device innovation is now attributed to software changes. Yet, while software is critical to future product innovation, it is commonly managed independently from the physical product in which it is embedded.
According to Gartner, “manufacturers aren’t paying enough attention to system engineering, product requirements management and quality monitoring as software increasingly becomes part of manufactured products.” A new generation of integral system engineering solutions is needed that can optimise requirements communication, collaboration and verification across the entire product development lifecycle.
“Software engineering has become a fundamental backbone element in today’s product development process,” said James Heppelmann, president and CEO of PTC. “As a result, companies are seeking a much more comprehensive management approach to their product lifecycle. By combining MKS Integrity with our PLM portfolio, PTC is setting a new standard for unified product lifecycle management with the industry’s only truly integral product configuration, collaboration and change management solution.”
The combination of MKS Integrity and PTC’s industry-leading PLM solutions enable manufacturers to:
- Enable best practices across hardware and software development lifecycles
- Establish a ‘single source of truth’ through the creation of a unified product definition and bill of materials (BOM) combining hardware and software components for both
- Increase engineering visibility across the entire development process to improve product quality, traceability, and long-term serviceability
- Drive innovation, accelerate time to market and reduce development costs by optimising the entire development process and minimising errors to improve customer satisfaction and help protect the manufacturer’s brand
For PTC, the addition of the MKS Integrity product line also opens up significant new market opportunities. The company expects to see strong revenue synergies as the benefits of combining hardware and software development processes are introduced to a broader customer base.
“The product engineering organisation of the future will be dominated by software developers, producing far more complex products in far shorter release cycles,” continued Heppelmann.
“Based on our review of the market, there is no other product that comes close to delivering the kind of value that MKS Integrity provides. What we’re really talking about with our strategy is the opportunity for manufacturers to fundamentally rethink the way they develop products across the board.”
Details about the business strategy for the combined companies will be outlined at PTC’s annual global user group event, PlanetPTC Live, June 12-15 in Las Vegas.