It appears that this merger of Gear’s big data technology and ANSYS’ semiconductor and electronic simulation will be aimed at improving the performance of the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms.

"System-on-chip and associated electronic systems are naturally big data problems — the interrelated nature of the billions of unknowns align with the core technologies inherent in Gear's simulation and analytics platform," said John Lee, Gear CEO.

ANSYS CEO Jim Cashman explains that the ANSYS simulation platform will be able to leverage its software and compute infrastructure with Gear. “Big data analytics will be increasingly important for our industry-leading semiconductor and electronic system customers to achieve faster time to market for their complex multi-core design platforms created using advanced manufacturing technologies,” he said.

Following PTC’s Lead?

Of course ANSYS isn’t the first engineering software company to get into the IoT world. PTC has invested more than half a billion dollars in its IoT ThinkWorx experiment. PTC wants to create “digital twins” that bring the IoT big data into the design cycle, allowing design teams to better optimize their products using real world data. The data can also be fed into ColdLight to predict the product’s failure. This can be used to improve product design and reliability.

Perhaps a similar workflow will be in store for ANSYS users?

IBM All In

While ANSYS and PTC are familiar to users of engineering software, they join many other players already heavily invested in IoT. UpFront.eZine summarized the IoT software market from application creation to analytics and data storage. Few, including PTC and ANSYS, can compete with the investments of IBM at $3 billion.

Will a newcomer like ANSYS be able to survive in what already seems to be a very active market with some very big players?

Clearly this merger creates more questions than it answers. How do you see ANSYS utilizing IoT? Comment below.