Philly Tech People News 1/19: Local guy Patterson making good at PTC ThingWorx

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Rob Patterson

Rob Patterson was recently named VP, Strategic Marketing at PTC, responsible for a portion of ThingWorx' market. Before that, he was VP, Product Marketing, and he joined PTC through its acquisition of Wayne-based of ColdLight Solutions (where he was in marketing and corporate strategy roles) in 2015. ColdLight was acquired as an integral part of ThingWorx' strategy.

He continues to work from Philly's western burbs (Exton) where ThingWorx also remains based. PTC ((NASDAQ: PTC), which acquired ThingWorx in late 2013 and made it and IoT one of the centerpieces of its corporate strategy (and made 4 other acquisitions around it), is headquartered in Needham, MA.

Since graduating from St.Joe's with a food marketing degree, Patterson has climbed through the ranks at a veritable who's who of Philly area employers, including Wawa, Microsoft Malvern, and Qlik Technologies. When he started with Qlik there were only 10 employees at its Radnor headquarters, Patterson told me in a phone conservation (Qlik originated in Sweeden), and from a marketing point of view they must have been starting from scratch. He was there when Qlik did its 2010 IPO.


Through this experience, Patterson gained expertise in BtoB marketing, not so much the mass market variety, but very targeted at a smaller universe of potential buyers. He applies this knowledge with ThingWorx, where he leads marketing for oil & gas, utilities, and "smart cities", the latter segment getting considerable publicity of late. ThingWorx' industrial marketing, and the management of its important GE relationship, are separate from that.

ThingWorx largely set the standard for industrial IoT by building an operating platform for it. It is not in consumer-related IoT, which is usually quite different in terms of standards, networks and applications. Although PTC's alliance with GE and its Predix software has gotten the most ink for ThingWorx over the past couple of years, the work of Patterson and others shows that it continues to develop the rest of the market as well.

From PTC's earnings report released yesterday:

"Bookings results were driven by strong performance in IoT, including one IoT mega deal (>$5m in bookings) and one IoT large deal (>$1m in bookings)."

Also this from the Boston Business Journal yesterday: Needham tech firm PTC hits highest stock price in 17 years.











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Wurtzel Stepping Down as NBCU Research Chief (Multichannel News)
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Sandy Wax Named COO of Lieberman Research Worldwide (Multichannel News)

Comcast Promotes Ed Brassel to Executive Vice President of Enterprise Business Intelligence for Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal


Comcast Promotes Lisa Bonnell to Senior Vice President and General Auditor

Kai Bond to Helm Comcast Ventures Catalyst Fund (Multichannel News)

Matt Aden is joining Exton-based SCTE/ISBE as VP of sales and sales operations (CED Magazine)

Monetate Promotes Adam Litle to VP Sales, North America

​​​Unisys Names Ann Sung Ruckstuhl as Chief Marketing Officer​
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FinancialForce selects former Salesforce and Heroku exec to be new CEO (TechCrunch)
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Honeywell President & COO Darius Adamczyk Joins Board of Directors (GovCon Executive)
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Edison Partners Wraps Up Stellar 2016, Begins 2017 with Partnership Promotions


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P’unk Ave Founder and Indy Hall Co-Founder Geoff DiMasi is the New Entrepreneur In Quorum


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TechXtend Promotes Kevin Askew to Vice President and General Manager

Links 1/2: Non-tech companies buying tech startups; Philly's 35-year-old accounting software

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PLM, BIM, ALM and IoT software providers: how much do you know about customers’ cloud strategies? (SandHill)
Mentions ThingWorx and Bentley Systems.

These tech startups are IPO candidates to watch in 2017 (Business Insider)

For Non-Tech Companies, if You Can’t Build It, Buy a Start-Up (NY Times: DealBook)

Philly's 35-year-old accounting software is somehow still kicking (Philly.com)

Comcast to resume airing Yankees, Nets after reaching deal with Fox (NJ.com)



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Links 12/19: Aereo founder's new broadband startup raises $$; Comcast's design for smart homes

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Comcast wants in on your smart home. Here's how it'll get there (CNET)

The Solid-State Electronic Dimmer
A technology innovation that set the stage for modern-day lighting controls. (Architectual Lighting)
Invented by Joe Spira, founder of Lutron. Based in Coopersburg(near Allentown), Lutron is a large business now and a leader in home IoT.

Aereo founder's new broadband startup raises $30M (Boston Business Journal)

AT&T Wireless Disconnecting Some BMW Cars' Roadside Assistance (Fortune)


Telcos Seen Following Verizon's Lead In Making IoT Acquisitions (Investor's Business Daily)

Lowenstein’s View: The wireless industry is changing before our eyes (FierceWireless)


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The SAP platform and digital transformation (ZDNet)

Johnson & Johnson chooses RI for Health Technology Center (NBC 10 Rhode Island)

Links 11/16: Infor eyes Oracle and SAP following $2bn injection by Koch Industries; RCN beats Comcast to gigabit speeds in Philadelphia area

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Koch Industries Pours $2.5 Billion into Business Software Maker Infor (Fortune)

Infor eyes Oracle and SAP following $2bn injection by Koch Industries (Information Age)

GE Digital acquires ServiceMax for $915m to further IoT vision (Diginomica)
Some interesting tidbits in comments section.
Emergence Capital, which made huge gains from backing Veeva Systems, was also a big winner here. ServiceMax is Salesforce-native, as
was Veeva's initial product. Salesforce was also an investor in ServiceMax.



Comcast wires Center City, University City for fiber for $30M (Philly.com)

RCN beats Comcast to gigabit speeds in Philadelphia area (Philly.com)


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Wells Fargo to unveil robo-adviser partnership with SigFig (Reuters)

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Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—joins the Linux Foundation (Ars Technica)

Links 10/5: Payoneer raises $180 million with help from Susquehanna Growth: Moxe Health raises $5.5 million led by Safeguard Scientifics

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Links 10/4: Verizon's PA landline problems; Thomas Jefferson University Hospital partners with IBM on IoT

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Saturday highlights; Amazon’s Alexa group on a massive hiring spree; ASUG Briefing: SAP’s $2.2 Billion IoT Push Includes Investment, M&A, Products, Labs

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Lux Research: Is GE too dependent on ThingWorx? (Update: GE partners with Microsoft on cloud services for Predix)

Tom Paine

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Update 6/11: GE Partners with Microsoft on Azure Cloud for Predix.

Fortune has an item this morning about a report by an outfit named Lux Research knocking GE's IoT software strategy and questioning the market readiness of its Predix software.

I have no firm basis for either dismissing or accepting Lux' conclusions. But I have often rolled my eyes at GE's projections for Predix. Perhaps much like IBM's Watson, GE is trying soften up the turf ahead with a heavy dose of PR artillery.

What's interesting is that report acknowledges and questions GE's dependence on PTC (primarily ThingWorx) for its go to market IoT platform.

"Predix is not as fully developed as GE represents it to be, has minimal market penetration, and has not been battle-tested at scale," said Isaac Brown, Lux Research Analyst and lead author of the report titled, "A Tale of Two IoT Titans: The Curious Case of the GE-PTC Partnership," in a statement.

"In contrast, the PTC solution has millions of connected devices across hundreds of scale customers", Brown added.

GE responded, saying claims in the report “are not based on fact or objective research,” and contain “numerous factual errors.”



It seems to me that if GE decides that the ThingWorx IoT platform is suitable for a longer term relationship, then the acquisition of all or part of PTC (NASDAQ:PTC) might be in order. PTC, which made its name by selling CAD/CAM software on workstations back when that was a novel concept, has declining revenue, and IoT constitutes only a small portion of that. But PTC has a market capitalization of only $4.3 billion, and GE could swallow it like a minnow if it wanted to. ThingWorx is headquartered in Boston now, closer to both GE and PTC.

Links 6/13: Apple announces new IoT app called Home; FanDuel, DraftKings in Merger Talks

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An early hint that GE might move to Boston?

Tom Paine

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Perhaps this announcement by GE, as described by NJ.com on June 2, 2014, was a precursor for GE's announcement this week that it was picking up its toys and moving its headquarters from Fairfield, CT to Boston. Perhaps the move was already in the early planning stages. Major corporate moves of that size usually require a five year planning horizon.

GE subsidiary to move jobs from Princeton, Piscataway


"GE Healthcare Life Sciences confirmed today its plan to consolidate operations near Boston, which will impact many of its 400 New Jersey employees — including job loss for some.
The facilities that will be closed next year are in Princeton and Piscataway. Operations in Livingston and South Plainfield will be unaffected by the plan, according to a company spokesman.
Of the Princeton and Piscataway employees, some will be invited to relocate to the Massachusetts facility, some may end up working remotely, while the third category would be laid off."

Though I feel little sympathy for Connecticut, whose inflexibility helped lose GE according to reports, knowing a bit about how the power structure works in that state. However, Connecticut apparently offered considerable incentives to Comcast in order for NBC Sports to relocate there three years ago.

Coincidentally, GE's move will bring it closer to PTC, headquartered in Needham, which is GE's primary IoT partner, with a significant contribution from its Exton-based ThingWorx unit. The geographical proximity doesn't mean anything in particular, but GE could snap up PTC in a minute if it wanted to.

Note: PTC announced another acquistion today to support ThingWorx and its IoT strategy.

Links 12/15/2014: SevOne signs STAR Campus lease

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BT Chooses EE Over O2 in $19.6 Billion Mobile Deal (Re/code)
More telecom consolidation across the Atlantic, as well.

Who Will Make Money in the IoT Gold Rush? (Sandhill)

Majesco to Merge With Cover-All (Insurance & Technology)
Cover-All Technologies is based in Morristown, NJ. Last week, Majesco acquired Agile Technologies of Bridgewater, as it attempts to build a powerhouse in P&C software.


DigitalOcean Displays 'Meteroic' Rise As Web Host (Information Week)

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Microsoft’s Azure Is Starting to Close the Gap With Amazon’s Cloud Service (Gigaom)

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Comcast Backs Internet Measurement Hackathon (Multichannel News)

T-Mobile teases 'Uncarrier' reveal as supercharged LTE goes live in New York (PC World)
Live in Philly also.