PTC Inc. (PTC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. It's great to have you with us, whether you are joining live or listening to the recording later. My name is Oliver Becker, and as a new member of the Alliance management team, I'm focusing on our ALM solutions portfolio at PTC. Before that, I spent the past years with several roles around PLM and product line engineering with Pure Variants. Today's session is focused on the significant business potential we currently see in the ALM space and more importantly, how we as partners can unlock this potential together to create greater value than any of us could achieve individually. I hope that this session will inspire you to gain business out of this super cycle intelligent product engineering. Before we get started, just a few quick housekeeping points. The webinar will last approximately 45 minutes. You can submit questions at any time using the chat box below. We will do our best to respond to your questions directly in the chat during the session, and any open questions will be answered afterwards in writing. So please feel free to engage with us throughout the webinar. We are looking forward to your input. With that, let's take a look at today's agenda and introduce our guest speakers. Joining us today from our office in Budapest, I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Peter Haller. Peter knows Codebeamer and the ALM market like very few others. As Director of Solution Consulting, he has been involved in countless customer discussions and brings a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the space. Today, he will walk us through the true potential of ALM and show us which topics resonate strongest across different industries. Following Peter, Tim Giles will join us from our office in Bristol. Tim will share practical insights on how to position ALM effectively, both with business decision-makers and engineering teams. In his role as an ALM seller for U.K. and Nordics, he brings hands-on experience from the field. And as a former employee of a global system integrator, he also understands the significant services potential that exists within ALM projects for system integrators. Finally, I will wrap up with a few thoughts on how we can further strengthen and scale our collaboration going forward. And with that, Peter, the stage is yours.

Great. Thanks, Oliver, and greetings, everybody. And here, let's dive into the details by starting with a statement that making incredible products is more complex than ever before. And what could go wrong there, what the problem is? Transformation is more complex than ever due to internal processes and external market forces like the ones you see on this slide. This starts with how the definition of the product has evolved. Software is defining today's products like never before and unifying your hardware and software development teams and practices is one of the most complex challenges our customers face. Complex geopolitical dynamics, of course, changing the cost profile and supply chain network, which is forcing companies to rethink where and how they design, source for and make their product. There are expectations to make more sustainable products, which require planning across the life cycle internally and with partners and suppliers. And then, of course, there is a question of how AI will transform the manufacturing space. In light of all of that complexity, the same three fundamental goals apply: faster, cheaper and higher quality. And this is where we come in. The smart connected product architecture doesn't exist in isolation. It's within the context of the things you see here. From a practical point of view, it starts with everything shifting to more electronic architecture where connectivity and interoperability are key. So what does that mean for companies in the market today? Think about what Elon Musk is saying. And now you can think what you like about the guy, but he's been extraordinarily successful. He says to use a watch and not a calendar, hours and minutes count, not the days and weeks. So for companies in the market, it means that every four weeks or so, you can provide additional value, additional functionality without shipping complete new versions of the product. Now this does beg the question, how you manage the product variance. But the important thing is to understand that this involves a complete change in the way of thinking. Instead of thinking that revenue is maximized at a point, the product leaves the factory floor, instead, it's about deriving revenue value throughout the entire life cycle of the product. It's this change in the mindset that is allowing our customers to differentiate and make safe upgradable and updatable products. And also, analysts are very clear about the ALM market is entering a strong growth phase right now and in the very near future. We are moving from roughly $5 billion in 2026 to potentially over $7 billion to $16 billion by 2032. That translates into a 7% to 50% CAGR with the higher end driven by next-generation ALM, integrated model-based and compliance-focused environment. Most importantly for this audience, the largest segment is large enterprises. These organizations are dealing with complex multi-domain engineering challenges and require end-to-end transformation. For GSIs, this is not just a tooling opportunity. It is a strategic transformation play, combining process, integration and governance at scale. So the takeaway, ALM growth is strong, but the real opportunity is in leading large-scale transformation programs in enterprise environments. All what the analysts are saying can also be found on our website supporting these claims and the market data provided by the researchers. You can also find us in a leading position in the QKS metrics there. So let's talk about key industry drivers here. Across industries, the cost of inaction is becoming a major driver for change. Longer development cycles, rising rework and R&D costs and increasing quality and compliance risks are forcing organizations to rethink their engineering approach. Let's take a look into each industry individually and a bit more in detail. Starting with automotive. Today, the automotive industry is shifting towards a software-defined vehicle where software is driving the entire engineering process. Customers are trying to adopt their architectures and processes, but they are struggling to bring together software and hardware domains effectively. When we introduce platform-based engineering and reuse, many customers might say, we have already been doing that for 20 years which is basically true, but historically, this reuse was focused on mechanical platforms and chassis, enabling car manufacturers to reuse physical structures. Today, the situation has fundamentally changed. Software is now driving the pace and all other domains must adapt to it. This leads to several key challenges, siloed domains and integration complexity. Customers struggle to integrate software and hardware domains and move towards centralized architectures. Ineffective reuse of existing assets. Their legacy assets are not structured for systematic reuse. They often rely on copy and clone approaches, manual adjustments and expert-driven decisions, which makes reuse inefficient and difficult to scale. Increasing complexity and the lack of control -- they do not fully understand how to manage the variability and reuse at scale. Therefore, this leads to uncontrolled complexity. Quality issues and recalls because systems are not properly integrated or validated, defect escape into production, contributing to increasing vehicle recalls. If we look at how reuse is typically handled today, there is a spectrum of maturity. At the lowest level, you will find clone-and-own, fully manual, highly error-prone. Then tool-supported reuse, for example, with the support of an ALM solution provides better traceability, but still highly manual and it supports only manual decisions. Then the next level is the library-based reuse. Standardized assets, but still dependent on human decisions. And finally, the most mature approach is utilizing product line engineering, highly automated, feature-driven reuse with rules and variability. The key gap is lack of automation and intelligence in today's approaches. The business impact is significant though. Development cycles are too slow, complexity is increasing, quality risks are rising and companies cannot keep up with faster competitors. Ultimately, customers need to reduce time to market significantly, ideally by half while improving efficiency and quality. So the core challenge becomes how do you systematically manage complexity, enable true reuse and automate variability so you can move faster and stay competitive. This is exactly where product line engineering PLE comes in, not just as a tool but as a methodology to transform how engineering and reuse are done at scale. What we are seeing in the automotive industry today is not isolated adoption. It is standardization at scale. Leading OEMs like BMW, Volkswagen Group, Renault, Mercedes and Toyota, along with many Tier 1s and semiconductor players are converging on Codebeamer as their strategic ALM backbone. This consistent pattern across all of these decisions is clear. They are moving away from fragmented legacy tool chains toward integrated ALM platforms to improve traceability, supply collaboration and enable product line engineering. What makes this particularly relevant and personal for me is that I had the opportunity to be directly involved in the early phase of this journey, starting with the first major automotive win for Codebeamer at BMW in 2016. That initial success created a strong foundation. And from there, we have seen a domino effect across the industry, expanding into virtually all major OEMs and the broad ecosystem of suppliers. Today, Codebeamer is not just a tool of choice in automotive. It represents a proven blueprint for managing complexity, scaling reuse and enabling software-defined vehicles. And that is exactly why other industries are now looking at automotive as the reference model for their own transformation. Automotive has effectively set the benchmark for modern ALMs. They started this journey more than a decade ago, early adoption of agile model-based development and product line engineering supported by integrated ALM platforms. That investment is now paying off through higher automation, better alignment across engineering domains and critically their ability to scale strategic reuse. Aerospace and defense, on the other hand, is now at an inflection point. There is a strong pressure to modernize legacy tool chains, move to integrated ALM and significantly improve collaboration and development speed. But the real driver is business transformation. A&D organizations are under pressure to cut the time to market often by half while managing increasing system complexity and compliance requirements. And the only way to achieve that is by adopting proven automotive practices, especially product line engineering and reuse at scale. So what we are seeing is clear five to seven years maturity gap, but also a major opportunity. For GSIs, this is critical. This is not incremental improvement. It is a catch-up transformation where partners can bring automotive expertise to accelerate A&D modernization and help close the gap. MedTech and pharma faces a somewhat different kind of a challenge. They face regulatory complexity, cost, margin pressure, relentless innovation, demand and speed to market challenges. Compliance, cost control, innovation and rapid release cycles are crucial for competitiveness. In the medical and pharma device industry, manufacturers face several core challenges, adapting to evolving regulations and standards. Regulatory complexity poses a significant hurdle for manufacturers. Navigating the intricate level of regulations requires robust documentation and traceability systems. Without these, companies risk facing legal repercussions and failing to ensure the efficiency of their products. Maintaining compliance with evolving regulations is crucial to avoid fines, sanctions and potential market exclusion. Cost and margin pressure. With the need to reduce service costs, optimize supply chains and speed up time to market, manufacturers must navigate the competitive landscape marked by rapid technological and regulatory changes to remain profitable and agile. Increasing costs for energy, supplied materials and parts impacting financial performance and profit, aging populations, rising chronic diseases, increasing wealth in developing countries, among other increased pressure on reimbursement systems. Pressure to innovate. Medtech companies face significant innovation challenges due to increasing patient demand for personalized and efficient health care, rapid technological advancements that require constant updates, intense market competition, competition necessitating differentiation and the need to balance innovation with stringent regulatory compliance. These factors collectively demand substantial investment in research, strategic planning and robust digital solutions to stay competitive and deliver cutting-edge medical solutions. And last but not the least, time to market here. It's critical for manufacturers. Any delays in bringing the product to market can result in significant lost revenue and a competitive disadvantage, faster approval, streamlines compliance, helping medtech companies bring devices to market quicker. In med tech and the pharma industry, success is defined by one thing above all, compliance by design across the entire life cycle. What we see across customers like Roche, Medtronic, CSL Behring and others is a clear move toward integrated ALM/PLM environments, replacing fragmented legacy systems. This is where PTC is uniquely positioned. We deliver a closed-loop ALM/PLM solution, connecting requirements, risk, development, verification, manufacturing and product data with full traceability. But the real differentiator is how we accelerate the compliance. PTC provides preconfigured validation-ready templates and documentation aligned to standards like ISO 13485, MDR and GxP covering the full life cycle from design to post market. And importantly, this is not only used for product development. Many of our customers also use Codebeamer for their internal process and system validation, ensuring that their engineering environments themselves meet the regulatory requirements. The result is clear, faster validation, lower compliance risk and significantly reduced implementation effort. So the takeaway is simple. With PTC, medtech and pharma companies do not just manage development, they can deliver compliant products faster by validating both their products and their processes on a single integrated platform. And this is why I hand it back to Oliver.

Thank you, Peter, for these great insights. I think the key takeaway is very clear. We are looking at a growing market with strong momentum. And at the same time, we already have a powerful footprint with many leading global customers. Now we don't have the time today to go deeper, but I'm sure Peter could easily spend another hour explaining why our ALM portfolio is one of the most complete and compelling offerings in the market today. Maybe that's something we could pick up in the following session. But for now, let's switch over to Bristol. I'm really looking forward to hearing how we can sharpen our messaging and translate this opportunity into concrete business. Tim, over to you.

Thank you, Oliver. And Oliver is right in his introduction, he said that I've worked for systems integrators, both large and small. So I understand the world you all have to operate within and the commercial imperatives that you face. And one of those is knowing where to hunt and what to say. And messaging is all about what you're going to say to people, to your prospects. But before that, you've got to determine who you're going to talk to. And this is because the message we impart depends on the person or persona we're talking to. So let's start at a high level. There's a great book called Selling to Zebra by Koser and Koser. And it's based upon how lions hunt. And a young lion will chase after everything and probably not catch much. If it does catch it, it's hard to kill. If it can kill it, it's hard to eat, it's not very good. What old experienced lions do is they hunt zebras, and they hunt them because they're easily identifiable. They know they can catch them. They know they can kill them. And when they do kill them, the whole pride benefits. And the same thing applies when we're looking at ALM prospects. So what we've done is we've assembled the five criteria that you see here in identifying the right place to hunt. And as a prospect checks the box for more than one criteria in the list, the value of the proposition becomes stronger. As we check the box with each additional criteria is the value of ALM skyrockets. You'll be able to capture even the most difficult prospects attention, qualify more opportunities in and sell more. So let's start at the bottom of this list. A weak ALM incumbent is an obvious starting point. There are several competitors out there, ALM IBM DOORS, DOORS next gen being one. And we've made quite a business out of replacing that solution over and over again. And remember that Codebeamer is a modern tool that differentiates in many ways from our competitors. It's got an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. It's got a long list of out-of-the-box integrations and the ability to manage numerous disciplines within one platform. So you're not having to swap between applications. You can pull all the different players within your organization into a single system. As you go up the list, perhaps the next one is most important for you is that it's a strong integration with Windchill. PTC's commitment to the market by adding in these high-value solutions like ALM and continued investment and the commitment to growing our entire integrated product set goes a long way. Now those prospects with complex products will be challenged with thousands of attributes and thousands of dependencies. And we want to find a way to easily capture and reuse data and easily extend it by managing variations of products simply and effectively, all the things that Peter just was talking about. If we then add in prospects operating in highly regulated markets where safety is of the utmost importance, where there's lots of regulations, ALM is mandatory, and it must operate flawlessly in order to help our customers navigate that challenge. Last and certainly not least, there are products that are software intensive and differentiate themselves with millions of lines of code, differentiating themselves from competitors and necessitating new sets of skills for manufacturing. I cannot tell you how many times customers have stated that this criteria is the most difficult for them to overcome. But the ones which really counter these two. So from a targeting point of view, if you can only remember these two points, safety critical, highly regulated, highly complex products, if you can just remember those two points, you won't go wrong. We can then see, well, what sort of industries do we go after? Well, like I said, anything that's complex can regulate it, just like all of these. But you might say, well, hold on, these are far too diverse. And where is the commonality. But if you think what Peter was saying earlier, there are a range of business problems that are common to them all. So that's where we have to focus. So when we talk about ALM, we need to talk about mastering complexity, faster innovation, time to market. The problem is that as sellers, all too often, we talk about the things at the bottom of this slide because that's what Codebeamer does. It's the features and functions. And it does it better than any other tool on the market. The features and functions are just table stakes. Where we differentiate ourselves is in tackling business problems. So at the early stage in the conversation with prospects, the focus should be on the layer just above. There will be plenty of time to delve into technicalities. But as a starting point, it's got to be on solving business problems because that's what our customers are concerned about. So let's target that. Now if we're talking about complexity, collaboration or efficiency, concentrate on these core messages, how end-to-end traceability helps tackle complexity and does it by making visible all the interconnections in your engineering fee. How we have a single platform, not this disjointed collection of tools that the customer has to link together and maintain or how real efficiency comes from the strategic reuse of assets, not just the sort of clone-and-own, which Peter mentioned earlier. This is where the conversation needs to focus. There's a lot more that we could go into on these slides. But if you want to download the slides later, you'll be able to see them all for yourself. And there's plenty of time to talk about things like the CI/CD integration or OSLC linking or any myriad of technical capabilities within Codebeamer. Instead, start the conversation by talking about business challenges, challenges that all these different vertical markets face. So as you can see here, we've taken our initial three of complexity, collaboration, efficiency and expanded them out to the ones you see here at the top. And it doesn't matter what industry the prospect is in, they all face these challenges. What we do is we help them address the challenges with a set of solutions that you see in the middle of the slide. But the things to concentrate, the things that are going to win you the business are the ones at the bottom. How do you increase growth? How do you reduce risk and how do you drive innovation. Those are the problems our customers face and those are the ones which should be our lighthouse when we're holding those initial discussions. So when we talk about selecting enterprise software, so we're in the selling process, this is a team score. And what I've done here is I've listed just a few of the players. And when you go into these opportunities, don't just think about it in terms of software. Mechanical and electronic engineers are part of the mix, too. The thing to remember is that while each of them have a different perspective, the key is being able to link them back to that business imperative that we talked about. That's how we win. It doesn't mean that you ignore them. It's just they have to be put into a business context. So from a CFO's perspective, we talk about reducing engineering cost, how poor quality is actually a financial risk and how improved quality drives the bottom line or how we can use AI to improve efficiency while maintaining regulatory compliance. So always be thinking in the same terms as the person you're talking to. Put yourself in their shoes. Now the same applies to the CTO. She'll want to deal with fragmentation because she realizes that there's a real impact on productivity and quality. She's going to be under pressure to do more with less at a time when complexity is increasing. And there's no better example of this complexity when you're using software to drive innovation. We're pursuing a software-defined product architecture is the goal. So for those early-day conversations, talk about business, not feature and function. So give you some examples of where we are. And from your point of view, there's a really good reason for holding these conversations. If you talk about feature and function, you instantly exclude yourself from having business-focused conversation with decision-makers and budget holders because the prize we're talking about isn't about implementing software. It's about helping customers tackle large-scale business transformations. And here's some examples of that. Each one of these Codebeamer opportunities or deals wasn't just about implementing the 12,000 users or the 1,000 users for medical devices. It was all about large-scale transformation that wrapped itself around these implementations. That's where the real value to you is. So let me give you a sort of personal example. Now we've got this quote from the CEO of Renault, who, by the way, is a large Codebeamer customer, talking about software-defined products. Now you might be skeptical about software-defined products, so it's just another hype wave, but I think that's wrong. And we're seeing software in places that we've never seen before. So let me give you an example. A long time ago, I learned to fly with the British Royal Navy. And the helmet that I war is very similar to the one you see here. It had a boom mic, had internal headset for comms, but no electronics and certainly no software. Now compare that to the helmet, the F-35 pilots were. The first thing to note is the price. I don't know what the price of mine was, but an F-35 helmet costs in excess of $400,000. And the reason it costs so much is because it does so much more than the helmet I wore. And I'll give you -- we'll walk you through a few examples of that. So with the F-35, for example, there's no head-up display. In the Eurofighter, for example, which is a fourth-generation aircraft, it has a little piece of glass at the top of the cockpit, where all the information is available for the pilot to fly and fight the aircraft, but they can see through it. So it's not impeding their vision. Now that's functionality that's hardware driven. It's now software-driven because the same information is displayed on the visor of the helmet of the pilot. So no matter where they look, they have that critical information in there. So from a user experience point of view, it's far richer, far more beneficial. If you then think about the way you used to fly an aircraft, if I wanted to look below the aircraft, I would have to put the stick over, roll the aircraft look, pull the stick back up. That impacts my ability to actually fly the aircraft. It takes me off target. F-35 pilots don't have to do that because their helmet is linked to a series of sensors and cameras on the skin of the aircraft. So when they -- all they have to do is look down and it's as if they're looking through the aircraft itself. So it's now part of the system. And finally, wherever the pilot looks, the weapons are slaved to that point. And it's not just on the aircraft, but it's part of an integrated battle space. So now the helmet is part of a system of systems. That's maybe an extreme example, but it's happening everywhere. Think about your car, your phone. Even VELUX, which is a customer of PTC, they have software-controlled windows. But if you just look at the issues identified here, it's not just about software. It's about how software is changing everything. And making that change is a significant business opportunity for you. Software implementation and configuration is just a part of that. It's the business transformation that represents the real opportunity for you. Use Codebeamer to monetize the full engineering life cycle. So it's not just about implementation, it's about the long-term ownership of the customers' engineering performance. Because once you're embedded, you become very difficult to replace. And so this is a continuously evolving situation for you that requires long-term partner engagement and more importantly, year-on-year revenue. And just to touch upon the last point on this list here, just as an example, at one level, reuse is making better use of engineering assets. But if you expand that, it's about helping a customer move to a modular product architecture. It's about helping them embrace product line engineering and all the organizational change that goes with it. This is high-value, high-margin work. So if you own the shift to software-defined products, you will own the client. So that's me done on messaging and deal potential. Oliver is now going to finish off by talking about how to partner with PTC and how to deliver on these engagements. Oliver?

Thank you, Tim. That was fantastic. And just to mention, if you are working on opportunities in the U.K., Benelux or the Nordics, Tim is a great contact to engage with you. Now let's move into a final part of today's session. The key question is how do we combine our strengths in a way that makes us together the best possible choice for our customers. Let's be honest, historically, our go-to-market motion has been product-led and reactive. We engaged late in the sales cycle, and that was fine for smaller departmental product deals. But enterprise ALM decisions are made much earlier around strategy, transformation and business outcomes. And that's exactly where you operate every day. So we are making a shift from reactive to proactive, from product-led to solution-led. Together with you, we want to engage the C-suite earlier with joint solutions that align to their transformation priorities. Let me show you what this partnership models look like in practice. This is the heart of our partnership model. Here's how we create value together. On PTC side, we commit to four phases. Number one, define and launch. We shape the solution scope, value proposition and joint road map together. Second, enable and differentiate. We provide certifications, enablement and co-developed accelerators so your team go to market with confidence. Number three, support go-to-market. We run joint marketing, enable your field teams and align on target accounts. Fourth, invest and evolve. We feed customer insights back into the road map and expand into new use cases. Your role is equally critical. solution commitment, align our solutions with your strategy and build a dedicated team. Shape and identify demand, bring us into strategic conversation early and lead executive engagements. Third, deliver and integrate, run implementation and system integration at scale. And lastly, drive adoption, own change management and make sure customers see real business outcomes. And this is a continuous cycle. We bring the platform and go-to-market engine, you bring industry expertise, customer relationships and deliver at scale. Neither site can do this alone. That's what makes the partnership powerful. Now let's look at what this means for the customer. This matters because customers want a clear answer to one question. What do I gain from this partnership that neither or few could deliver on your own? When you combine your delivery expertise with our platform, customers get faster time to value, shared accountability for outcomes and significantly lower project risk. That's the value you create. And for you, it translates into real influence on the solution, a differentiated offering they can't get off the shelf and measurable business impact. Bottom line, together, we don't just deliver technology. We deliver scalable solutions with shared accountability for outcomes. And we want to make sure you have everything you need to execute on this. That's why we have reorganized our alliance management team under new leadership, specifically to support you better. Let me introduce the team and the resources we have put in place. Kevin Brooks has been leading the global alliance management team since the start of this year. Here, you see the reorganized team of global alliance managers, some familiar faces and some new ones. I'd like to highlight that we now have a dedicated marketing role within the team. We are glad to welcome Coray as a Director of GSI Partner Marketing. Some of you may already know her from her previous role in Corporate Communications. And here, you see all our field alliance managers across the regions. In total, more than 20 people work exclusively for PTC's service partner ecosystem, thus all the sales, marketing and service support behind the scenes. Do you have any doubt that we take this engagement seriously? Now let's look at the resources we provide to you. On the slide, you can see that we have internal and external resources like solution plays, seller stories, news and updates, joint case studies, partner landing pages and the LinkedIn community. If you are launching something by industry or region, start here before reinventing content. Let me bring together what we covered today. We started with a clear message. ALM is a business priority, not just a tool decision. The market is growing fast, projected to more than double by 2032, and PTC is the recognized leader in this space. Peter showed us the forces driving this growth. Software is taking over product development, regulations are getting tighter and the cost of falling behind is steep. Longer development cycles, more rework, higher compliance risks. These are real problems that our customers face every day. Tim then made a powerful case for why ALM is such a strong business for system integrators. This is not a onetime implementation. It is a self-expanding service model. Requirements lead to quality management, variance demand governance, compliance calls for continuous traceability. Every problem you solve opens the door for the next engagement. This is a long-term ownership of how your customers build products. And in the final part, we look at how PTC and our system integrator partners go to market together. We are moving away from reactive product-led motions towards proactive solution-led growth with clear roles, shared accountability and a joint commitment to deliver real customer value. So three things you can do in the next 30 days. First, pick one or two accounts where ALM is a natural fit, software-intensive products, regulatory pressure, a weak ALM solution in place, bring those names to your PTC alliance contact. We will shape the approach together. Second, tap into the resources we showed you, solution plays, case studies, field academy, it's all there and ready to use. Don't start from scratch. And third, reach out to our alliance management team, whether it's a joint workshop, a co-selling play or a conversation about building your ALM practice. We are here for you. You can also reach me directly at [email protected]. And please believe me, the opportunity is real. The market is moving now, and we are better together. Thanks again to Peter and Tim for their great contribution today. And thank you all for joining this webinar. Let's make it.