Ann: ADRC soon to be available on Intel IOT gateway platform-XPE.AX, page-395

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GE Software was founded in 2011 with a $1 billion investment. CEO Jeff Immelt has declared that GE needed to evolve into a software-and-analytics company, lest its industrial machines become mere commodities. Immelt has set an ambitious target of $15 billion in software revenue by 2020. GE plans to achieve this through its new Predix software platform under the leadership of CEO of GE Digital, Bill Ruh.

PTC has taken an M&A path and invested more than $400 million in a series of companies: ThingWorx for $112 million, a $105 million acquisition of ColdLight and Axeda for $170 million. On the venture side you may not have noticed, but Uptake, a Chicago-based IoT startup, beat Slack and Uber to become Forbes 2015’s Hottest Startup. They raised $45 million at a $1 billion post-funding valuation.

I’ll let you be the judge of whether it’s time to invest in IoT. But if you’re an early-stage or even late-stage investor, it would be wise to be a student of this area as it promises to create as big a disruption as the second generation of enterprise software. And if you’re a startup with a vision to build products for things, not people, get started. Maybe in 12 years we’ll talk about you like we now talk about VMware, NetSuite and Salesforce.