Marketplace for IoT

I think I first met Russ and Rick, the founders of ThingWorx, about 15 years ago at a National Manufacturing Week trade show (remember those?) as they were launching Lighthammer—a data connectivity product that has worked out well for eventual owner, SAP.

They came back with a new start up a few years ago named ThingWorx. This company provides a platform designed to efficiently build and run the applications of today’s connected world. Its model-based design and search-based intelligence reduces application development efforts by 10X, minimizing cost, risk and time to market. The ThingWorx platform combines the key functionality of Web 2.0, search, and social collaboration, and applies it to the world of “things,” including connected products, machines, sensors, and industrial equipment.

This idea of connecting the world of things intrigues me. We’ve discussed it for years, but I think that we as an industry are nearing critical mass where things begin talking with things and humans interact simply to direct processes and make critical decisions.

ThingWorx announced Nov. 18 the immediate availability of the ThingWorx Marketplace. The ThingWorx Marketplace is 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 is a first mover in an exciting new niche with vast potential,” stated Emil Berthelsen, Principal Consultant at Machina Research. “Through application extensibility, ThingWorx Marketplace aims to deliver a comprehensive and complete apps store that allows developers to integrate with other systems, devices, industries and partners in a quick, seamless, and highly intuitive way.”

The ThingWorx Marketplace offers a wide range of components and services that are required for innovative M2M and IoT applications, including: 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.

“As a ThingWorx Partner, we are excited about the release of the ThingWorx Marketplace,” stated Alicia Asín, Co-Founder and CEO of Libelium. “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.”

The ThingWorx marketplace provides value to all members of the M2M/IoT value chain including:

• Enterprise Customers – deploy a private instance of the Marketplace, to simplify sharing of internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, visualizations and services.
• ThingWorx Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Partners – deploy a private labeled instance of the Marketplace, to simplify sharing of partner specific applications, analytics, visualizations and services.
• Marketplace Partners – an opportunity to make a company’s intellectual property available to customers on a global basis, offering new ways to promote and monetize their offerings.

“We are excited about the launch of the ThingWorx Marketplace,” stated Russ Fadel, CEO of ThingWorx. “With the predicted 50 billion connected ‘things’ by 2020, we believe there will need to be at least 5 million applications created to drive value. Our Marketplace will provide the next significant improvement in application development efficiency by providing a global market with the building blocks necessary to rapidly assemble these applications.”