ThingWorx 9.0 Is Here! Here Are 5 Reasons to Be Excited

As we would all agree, 2020 has been an unprecedented year with many challenges. I am amazed and very proud of all we were able to accomplish as a team in the latest version of ThingWorx. Our market-leading industrial IoT solutions platform has the power to make digital transformation a reality and ThingWorx 9 is now loaded with a full range of new and updated features that will increase uptime, reduce service costs, and improve efficiency across your enterprise.

Industrial IoT has been evolving rapidly as a technology paradigm over the last decade, with early focus on the value that connectivity from sensors and machines can bring, to the next obvious need to organize and analyze those new streams of data. Along that technology arc, there has also been a tremendous focus on putting connectivity and data to work toward business processes that can profoundly benefit from those generated data insights. This convergence of the maturity of IoT technology and the clarity and energy to accelerate business value brings us to where we are today, and we have been hard at work in the ThingWorx platform to represent the experience that our teams, our partners, and our customers have collectively won.

As business leaders across industries look for an industrial IoT platform that delivers on the promise of digital transformation and meets their scale and security requirements, we enable them with a platform that not only delivers these requirements, but also provides the ability for quick, meaningful insights to bring innovative products to market.

ThingWorx 9 enables organizations to enhance availability, scalability, operability, and deployments. The new IIoT capabilities expand connectivity options and add enhanced modeling and scoring to analytics. There are several reasons to upgrade, but here are my favorites:

1. High Availability and Horizontal Scalability

We are proud to have “cracked the code” on delivering a highly scalable architecture that maintains the flexibility and power that our customers have come to expect from the ThingWorx experience. Active-active clustering yields the highest availability for IIoT solutions, minimizing potential for downtime and data loss. Horizontal scalability let’s you accommodate more devices connected to your system, more users using the applications and interacting with the system, and more workflows business logic analytical processing happening around the system.

2. Enhanced Modeling and Scoring for Predictive Analytics

ThingWorx already offers significant functionality to improve decision making, optimize operational processes, and reduce unplanned downtime. ThingWorx 9 improves upon these capabilities even more by enhancing the platform’s deployment architecture for edge deployments to accommodate the scoring of predictive analytics models closer to the data source for more timely insights. New confidence model training enables codeless creation of confidence models that provide a range of uncertainty for a given prediction to better facilitate automated processes and enhance human decision-making. In addition, Confusion Matrix Weights can be entered while training predictive models to optimize model threshold selection based on business value. 

3. Expanded Options for Connectivity

ThingWorx 9 seamless integration between ThingWorx Kepware, Microsoft Azure, and the ThingWorx platform leverages OPC-UA to standardize data modeling, delivering intelligence and data richness from the edge to the cloud. This release also allows ThingWorx applications to subscribe to data and events from Rockwell FactoryTalk Historian (FTH). The FTH Asset Framework model is exposed in ThingWorx, enabling the ability to build a Thing Model from the Asset Framework templates in Historian.

4. ThingWorx Solution Central Improved Application Support

Experience the ability to enable IIoT across the enterprise with Solution Central via streamlined deployment and management of all ThingWorx apps. The new release improves self-service features, including the ability to view all active deployment requests, deactivate instances, delete solutions, and more.

5. New Enterprise Security Features

While there are many new features to cover, security is one we take most seriously and ensure each release resolves security vulnerabilities. The addition of Delegated Authorization to ThingWorx Flow enables the ability to pass user identity through Flow connections. This is an essential feature for use with many integrated engineering, manufacturing, and service applications. ThingWorx SDKs offer secure and robust SSL/TLS support by providing support for the latest version of OpenSSL

Following the release, keep an eye out for a new bundle offering, Factory Insights-as-a-Service, from PTC, Microsoft, and Rockwell Automation. Accelerate time to value for some of the most critical use cases affecting production, asset, and workforce efficiency while future-proofing your digital transformation roadmap.

For further details, join me on June 25th, when Sebastian Bergner, Sr. Product Experience Specialist, PTC, and I will hold a live webcast to share additional updates and demo ThingWorx 9.0. If you are not able to join live, feel free to register and you will receive a link to the recording shortly after.