Global partnership agreements announced with PTC and Microsoft, to support our overall digital growth

Data Driven Advantage (DDA) is one of our key growth strategies. In essence, DDA is mainly about deriving value through a multitude of capabilities enabled by inexpensive data collection, storing and processing technologies, with a clear goal to drive differentiation and enable value to existing products.

Establishing a successful DDA strategy for us, as the solutions providers, is all about deriving growth in the space around our products and not directly through our products and this will result in increased product value through a suite of digital solutions.

Essential to the success of the Howden DDA strategy are the global partnership agreements that were signed at the end of 2017 with PTC and Microsoft, to support our overall digital growth. As a result, we will employ PTC ThingWorx and Microsoft Azure at the core of our DDA strategy. The PTC partnership, specifically, allows us to leverage a world leading Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) platform that includes smart analytics, AI powered machine learning, augmented reality and much more.

This very solution was recently assessed by Forrester in a report which evaluated PTC and 10 other vendors on a wide range of criteria for IoT software platforms, which "help simplify deploying, managing, operating, and capturing insights from IoT-enabled connected devices". The results of this report, summarised below, place PTC ahead of the other players in this space.

We will be further enabled in our digital transformation journey by the mutual collaboration recently formalised between PTC and Microsoft, which will support us with completely integrated world leading IoT solutions.

With ThingWorx and Azure, Howden will be able to capitalize on the opportunities inherent in the Internet of Things to quickly grow and scale its operations.

For more details, contact Dr Maria Wilson, maria.wilson@howden.com