Revenera Powers Monetization of PTC’s ThingWorx IoT Platform

MONETIZATION REQUIREMENTS IN AN IOT WORLD

ThingWorx is used by PTC partners to develop their IoT offerings as well as manufacturers who run their IoT processes based on the platform.

With the IoT evolving and growing at a staggering pace, PTC needed to leverage a monetization platform that could:

• Manage, track and securely automate subscriptions and other monetization models
• Measure and manage devices, users, API calls and other metrics as a basis for monetization
• Provide robust and flexible support for PTC’s exponentially growing partner and customer ecosystem

Also, scalability in a very dynamic environment was a key requirement. The ThingWorx platform manages workloads between multiple servers that can be added as needed. They needed to provision licenses in a flexible and secure manner between multiple servers.

BUILDING ON A STRONG MONETIZATION STANDARD

Besides PTC’s main goal to monetize and protect ThingWorx, the company also wanted to standardize on a strong monetization platform that could be used for other PTC offerings such as its Windchill product lifecycle management (PLM) system.

PTC wanted a central monetization platform that could provide a complete view of their customer base and monetization models and ease processes related to entitlement management, subscription management and compliance control—for on-premises and SaaS offerings. 

BUSINESS GOALS

As an industry leading software supplier, PTC had set clear, strategic goals. After meeting with the Revenera team, PTC discovered that the Revenera Monetization Platform was perfectly positioned to deliver on these goals:

Flexible monetization and compliance models—A platform able to support both perpetual and subscription models and work with different metrics as a basis for monetization.

Scalable support for future SaaS products—A solution that can handle user and use right provisioning for SaaS applications while feeding back usage and entitlement information to the central monetization platform.

Better insight into customer base—In-depth customer information across different product lines for consistent and automated software monetization processes.

Automated subscriptions and renewals—The ability to manage and automate subscriptions and renewals.

A frictionless user experience—Automated and easily managed monetization and software delivery processes, based on customer entitlements. Easy to handle for internal operations teams, but also for partners and customers using a self-service portal.

SOLUTION

PTC implemented Revenera’s Software Monetization platform, using FlexNet Operations as a central entitlement management back office and FlexNet Embedded as the flexible licensing technology integrated in ThingWorx. The Revenera Integration Framework was used to create seamless integration with PTC’s existing back-office workflows to manage customer entitlements.

Revenera’s Monetization Platform supported all of PTC’s outlined needs right out of the box in a standard setup. And throughout the entire process—from strategic planning, to design and implementation and training—Revenera Global Consulting Services fully supported and aligned with the PTC team. The result this collaboration was a first-pass success with zero business downtime.

BUSINESS OUTLOOK

Today, ThingWorx seamlessly leverages Revenera’s software monetization technology. In its on-going effort to provide an improved customer experience and to reduce the home-grown solutions still used in their other products, PTC will continue to move existing products onto the Revenera platform. That will give the company the comprehensive view on all its customers on all its products and the usage insights needed to successfully grow its business.