Over the last 18 months or so, ThingWorx has developed and evolved its M2M, model-based design and search-based application development platform enough to have become the leading player in the space. It is commonly estimated that companies that using the platform - either as a standalone platform or in combination with their own existing platforms - typically result in as much as a 10x savings in development time. This is substantial and plays a key role in reducing cost, risk and - most importantly - time to market.
The ThingWorx platform combines the key functionality of Web 2.0, search, and social collaboration, and applies it to the M2M world (aka the Internet of Things or IoT), which includes connected products, machines, sensors and industrial equipment. Businesses use the ThingWorx platform to rapidly deliver M2M applications and connected solutions ranging from manufacturing, energy and food, to remote monitoring and service, as well as "larger" Internet of Things applications such as smart cities, the smart grid, agriculture and transportation.
Over the last year we've covered the ThingWorx platform in detail and we've kept tabs as well on a variety of ThingWorx partnerships, which we believe is the secret sauce behind the platform's rise as a critical tool in the M2M and IoT development ecosystem. So it is certainly of great interest to us that this morning ThingWorx announced the immediate availability of its new "ThingWorx Marketplace."
It is, perhaps, the ultimate expression of the efforts the company has put behind not only in building out the platform but in assembling a world class collection of partners (as we noted above). The ThingWorx Marketplace is, at its core, a global platform that enables developers, hardware and software providers, and systems integrators to build value-added IoT/M2M components and make them available to a broad range of companies.
The ThingWorx Marketplace will continue to build on ThingsWorx' business mantra (not to mention its core brand value) of delivering ongoing breakthroughs in continuing to reduce those critical competitive things we noted above - cost, time, risk and effort it takes to build and deploy complete IoT/M2M applications.
As the Marketplace grows, developers will be able to assemble the bulk of their applications from a global catalog of prebuilt and tested components, speeding time to market and improving application quality. The ThingWorx Marketplace puts on the table a wide range of components and services that are required for innovative M2M and IoT applications.
These components include widgets, analytics, application templates, device connectors, protocol adapters and integrations to device clouds, provisioning platforms, enterprise systems and big data stores. These components are built by ThingWorx, ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers. It is born, clearly, of ThingWorx' efforts at building partnerships to expand its platform ecosystem.
ThingWorx believes that the new marketplace will provide value to all members of the M2M/IoT value chain. These include:
- Enterprise Customers: It is possible for enterprise customers to deploy private instances of the Marketplace, which will simplify sharing of internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, visualizations and services.
- ThingWorx Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Partners: All partners that deliver ThingWorx in a PaaS model will be able to deploy a private labeled instance of the Marketplace, which will simplify sharing of partner specific applications, analytics, visualizations and services.
- Marketplace Partners: This is the earlier secret sauce we noted - ThingWorx Marketplace represents a unique opportunity to make partner intellectual property available to customers to share on a global basis, offering new ways to promote and monetize their offerings.
There is a common word that appears across each of the above - "share." It is this sharing - whether amongst employees, customers and partners within an enterprise or through global partners. This is the key to ThingWorx' ongoing success.
Alicia Asín, co-founder and CEO of Libelium (a ThingWorx partner we've covered) certainly makes this clear in noting, "As a ThingWorx Partner, we are excited about the release of the ThingWorx Marketplace. The Marketplace provides us with a venue for making our sensor products and Meshlium Cloud platform front and center to a global ecosystem of M2M and Internet of Things developers and solution providers."
Russ Fadel, ThingWorx' CEO underscores the need for partnerships and the Marketplace,“We are excited about the launch of the ThingWorx Marketplace. With a predicted 50 billion connected things by 2020, we believe there will need to be at least 5 million applications created to drive value. The Marketplace will provide a significant improvement in application development efficiency by providing a global market with the building blocks necessary to rapidly assemble these applications.”
The ThingWorx Marketplace will first be available to ThingWorx customers and partners. General availability is expected in Q1 2014. More information is available on the ThingWorx Marketplace at the ThingWorx website.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
