Inray has announced the Channel Advantage partnership with PTC. "The IoT is growing intensively, also in D-A-CH and Central Europe. This is why Inray's presence with industrial software solutions for MES and MDE that are already widely represented on the market significantly strengthens the importance of our ThingWorx product family," says Georges Millet, Vice President EMEA Channel Sales, PTC. Inray intends to use the partnership to expand its functionalities, as Sören Rose, Managing Director with power of representation, explains: "We welcome the partnership with PTC, as our software products can now also integrate ThingWorx and Kepware functionalities."

The two companies have been working together for some time: Inray has been a distributor for Kepware - which was acquired by PTC two years ago - in Germany for over 8 years. "Kepware's Kepserver is one of the leading OPC servers on the market and, with its more than 160 communication drivers, is the gateway to the machine park. OPC and, increasingly, OPC UA are the basis of industrial applications today and therefore also the driver of IoT and Industry 4.0 in the industrial environment," says Rose.

The Kepserver now serves as a connectivity layer for the Thingworx platform. "Our customers' existing MES systems or existing OPC infrastructures provide a good basis for setting up IoT applications, as valuable data is already available. Thanks to the partnership, Thingworx can create new views here, reveal insights and offer new operating options," Rose continues. The task for Inray is to use the existing sources and make them available to the Thingworx platform. This is done via the Kepserver, the Inray OPC router via SDK and direct database access. "The result is completely new possibilities in the IoT world. Inray supports this as a service provider and reseller of licenses," says Rose.

The connection to the Thingworx platform opens up new possibilities for Inray users to provide and process data. To do this, Thingworx Foundation is first used to create things with attributes. These attributes are brought to life with the data points from the Connectvity level. In this way, the digital twin is created as a digital image of the real object. ThingWorx Foundation can be used to create corresponding web interfaces that can be used to view and visualize the status and data of the objects. Augmented and virtual reality functionalities of Thingworx offer further possibilities. In addition to the various options for user interaction, the data can also be processed in ThingWorx Analytics using machine learning. The results are patterns for predictions and anomaly detection.