Ayush Tiwari serves as Director of Product Management at ThingWorx, bringing over a decade of expertise from his tenure at PTC. His key focus area is to continuously enhance ThingWorx platform and applications to enable manufacturers to improve their operations, quality, performance, and service at scale as part of their Digital transformation efforts. A recognized industry leader, Ayush is currently working on advancing the platform for low-code development powered by Gen-AI capabilities to maintain its competitive edge and leadership in IIoT space.
One of the recurring frustrations customers face is that their systems don't talk to each other well. Data gets stuck in silos, integrations are expensive to build and maintain, and initiatives that work in one plant are hard to replicate elsewhere. It's not a new problem, but it's one the industry has struggled to address in a systematic way.
That's part of why we've been working with CESMII, the Smart Manufacturing Institute, and why we're supportive of what they're building around interoperability standards.
CESMII has organized their approach around three architectural imperatives: Smart Manufacturing Profiles (SM Profiles) for information modeling, Smart Manufacturing Interoperability Platforms (SMIP), and Smart Interfaces (i3X). These aren't aspirational concepts. They're a concrete framework that gives manufacturers and technology providers a shared starting point, which is what has been missing.
What velotic built
Velotic’s Solution Consulting team has put together a set of CESMII Integration Building Blocks for ThingWorx that make it practical to work within this framework. Here's what they do:
The first piece handles SM Profile import. You can pull a CESMII SM Profile directly into ThingWorx through a UI, browse the object type hierarchy, pick what's relevant to your environment, and move forward without needing to manually map between the standard and the platform.
From there, the building blocks generate the corresponding ThingWorx thing model automatically, creating the Thing Templates and Thing Shapes based on what you selected. This saves a meaningful amount of modeling time and keeps the output aligned with the SM Profile rather than drifting from it over time.
The third piece is i3X support. The solution exposes the standard CESMII i3X REST endpoints, so other applications built to work with i3X can connect to your ThingWorx environment without needing custom integration work on either side.
The solution is built on ThingWorx 10.1 and installs through the standard Composer extension import process. It's straightforward to get running.
Why this matters in practice
Standards adoption takes time, and interoperability across the broader ecosystem is still a work in progress. But there are some concrete business scenarios where this kind of support makes a real difference.
The most common one I see is multi-site rollout. A manufacturer deploys a condition monitoring or OEE application at one plant, it works well, and then they want to replicate it across ten other facilities. Without a shared information model, that "replication" often turns into a rebuild each time because the underlying data structures are different at every site. When the original application is built on an SM Profile and the platform supports it natively, that rollout gets considerably less complicated.
Another scenario is working with a broader ecosystem of applications. A lot of our customers don't want to run everything through a single vendor. They want to connect best-of-breed analytics tools, MES systems, or AI applications from different providers. i3X is designed to make that kind of open connectivity possible without requiring everyone to build custom point-to-point integrations. ThingWorx exposing those endpoints means it can participate in that ecosystem rather than being a walled garden.
There's also a more immediate practical benefit around information modeling time. Building out a ThingWorx data model that accurately reflects your production assets and processes is real work. When a CESMII SM Profile already exists for your industry or equipment type, being able to import it directly and generate the thing model from it removes a significant portion of that upfront effort.
Having native SM Profile and i3X support in ThingWorx means customers who are moving toward CESMII-aligned architectures don't have to do that foundational work themselves. It lowers the barrier to getting started, and it keeps ThingWorx compatible with the direction the industry is heading.
For customers managing multiple plant sites or working with partners and integrators who also use CESMII standards, the consistency this creates is genuinely useful.
Next steps
Velotic will be demonstrating these capabilities at the CESMII Interoperability Forum on August 4, 2026, a free virtual event co-hosted with the Manufacturing Leadership Council. The agenda covers the business case for interoperability, architecture approaches, and live cross-platform demonstrations from a number of technology providers. Speakers from Toyota, GE Appliances, General Mills, ExxonMobil, and others will share their perspectives as well. If you're building a more scalable and interoperable smart manufacturing architecture, join the forum to see proven approaches, live cross-platform demonstrations, and real-world lessons from industry leaders.
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