ThingWorx Industrial IOT Platform

What do you like best?

ThingWorx provides and end-to-end framework to design and develop an IoT platform from scratch in considerably quick time. Have mostly used ThingWorx for Remote monitoring/ Service portals, and in that context it is a very robust portal to connect your IoT Devices to a cloud platform.

ThingWorx Mashup Builder optimal for developing low and medium complexity screens effortlessly with minimal code. It offers a complete set of UI widgets, tools and extensions that enable development using a drag-and-drop interface, including standard data visualization charts, grids, and forms, and collaboration tools like blogs, wikis, etc. For highly complex UI requirements, you can utilize the ThingWorx using REST APIs as the back-end layer to connect with a more flexible UI component outside ThingWorx, eg: any JS framework like AngularJS or ReactJS.

Connectivity to device is simple and enabled using connection services. Multiple connectivity options are available, including third party device clouds, direct network connections, Open APIs, and ThingWorx AlwaysOn connectivity using the ThingWorx Edge MicroServer.

ThingWorx also provides a ThingWorx Flow component which provides rapid and ready integration with Enterprise systems like Salesforce and SAP, and allows you to configure workflows based on the system actions. ThingWorx also readily integrates with other PTC offerings like PLM (Thingworx Navigate) , Analytics and Vuforia.

What do you dislike?

Current ThingWorx version 8.5.x doesn't provide capabilities for Horizontal scaling and clustering. So when dealing with processing large magnitude of data, you will have to rely on vertical scaling limits. However this will be resolved in the 9.0 release which will have clustering feature.

ThingWorx doesn't provide standard tools for Build & Deployment, and Code analysis/coverage, which are good-to-have from a developer perspective. Thus when building complex applications, validating and promoting code between dev and productions systems has to be carefully managed.

Also while ThingWorx Mashups can now be styled using CSS, performance improvements are needed for loading and managing the style files. Also you need to spend additional effort to configure the mashup and layout to get a nice look and feel.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Go with ThingWorx if you are looking for an easy and rapid setup of an IoT solution for Remote monitoring and Service. ThingWorx provides a highly performant, event-driven, end-to-end platform that provides connectivity, storage, analysis, and collaboration capabilities required for connected applications. Though not recommend if you are looking for advanced device management or DevOps integration.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

ThingWorx allows you to rapidly create an IoT platform to capture data and events from connected Things. Based on our experience the development Time is reduced by almost 5X. This minimizes the time-to-market for Customers who want to leverage this data to enhance existing business processes, solve problems and discover opportunities faster.