by Brendan Bradley | 10/5/2023
On October 4th of 2023, PTC (NASDAQ: PTC) announced the acquisition of Germany-based pure-systems, a leading vendor of product line engineering (PLE) tools through its pure::variants solution. PLE solutions provide variant management capabilities to manufacturers, enabling them to efficiently share engineering assets across product families, greatly reducing development time and costs. This capability is incredibly useful within automotive and aerospace markets, characterized by interrelated product lines consisting of complex systems and components.
The addition of pure-systems fits well within PTC’s growing portfolio of application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, focused on providing advanced product line configuration capabilities to developers in PTC’s core industrial IoT (IIoT) customer base of automotive, medical device, and aerospace & defense manufacturers. PTC is yet to state exactly how the pure::variants solution will be integrated into their portfolio, and whether it will continue as a standalone product or be folded into an existing solution such as WindChill Modeler.
The purchase of pure-systems follows the 2022 acquisition of Intland Software by PTC, which the latter used to reinforce and renew its position as a leader in ALM tool markets with its Codebeamer solution. PTC has focused on M&A as a key driver of the expansion of its tool suites, with the major acquisition of ServiceMax expanding the company’s capabilities within service lifecycle management (SLM) in an effort to establish a comprehensive suite of tools that enables manufacturers to address each and every aspect of the DevOps lifecycle, a goal that was emphasized by PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann during this year’s PTC LiveWorx event.
This move greatly consolidates the market for standalone PLE vendors, with the sole remaining notable player in the field being BigLever. Engineering organizations are increasingly seeking wide-encompassing ALM platforms and suites of tools such as those offered by PTC, rather than standalone variant management solutions. It will be interesting to see whether or not BigLever becomes the target of a similar acquisition and/or how it adapts its partnership strategy in the face of this evolving landscape.
This acquisition should prove beneficial to both enhancing PTC’s ability to deliver more robust tooling to its existing customers, as well as enabling PTC to establish a larger presence in pure-systems’ native European markets.
To learn more about the evolving market for requirements management and product line engineering tools, including detailed quantitative and qualitative coverage of BigLever, PTC, and pure-systems, check out VDC’s report, The Global Market for Requirements Management & Definition Tools.