DOWNINGTOWN, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ThingWorx, a revolutionary platform designed to accelerate the development of applications connecting people, systems and physical world, today announced that demand for the company’s ‘Internet of Things’ platform in manufacturing and other sectors is driving internal growth. With the number of connected devices expected to reach over 22 billion by 2020, adoption of smarter systems, like those developed by ThingWorx, is expected to grow dramatically. As such, the company announced expansion across all departments, including two key new hires and the recent relocation to a new, larger corporate headquarters. The added staff and new space will provide the company with the resources to extend its scalable software, host corporate demonstrations of the technology and allow for future growth.
“We're adding key executives across all departments to address the needs of the connected world and the potential application of our technology to deliver operational innovation and increased productivity,” says Russ Fadel, CEO and co-founder of ThingWorx. “We've identified manufacturing, M2M and the Smart Grid as initial targets for our technology platform to improve resource management and productivity, and our growth, including a substantially larger headquarters, will provide us with the scalability to meet the increasing demands of those businesses.”
As part of the company’s growth, ThingWorx announced two strategic new hires to serve the penetration of the manufacturing industry. John Schaefer was named the company’s new vice president of product management, and Dave Westrom joined the company as the new vice president of business development.
“John and Dave are remarkable talent acquisitions for our growing company, and they’ll both be key to our initial sales and deployments,” continued Fadel. “Their experience in both early stage and large enterprises will contribute to our early success.”
Before joining ThingWorx, Schaefer was vice president of solution management, manufacturing at SAP Labs, where he led product development and consulting for supply chain management and manufacturing solutions across several vertical industries. Prior to SAP Labs, Schaefer was vice president of product development at Lighthammer Software, an independent software vendor of manufacturing intelligence and integration software for the manufacturing industries, which was acquired by SAP.
Westrom was most recently vice president of strategy and business development at BL Healthcare, where he was responsible for corporate strategy, sales, and marketing at an early stage company focused on next generation remote patient healthcare management solutions. Prior to that, he worked as vice president global field operations at OutPerformance. Earlier, Westrom held the title of global account executive at SAP, where he managed large enterprise chemical customer accounts. Westrom was also vice president of strategic accounts and business development at Lighthammer Software, where he directed a new model for sales and marketing by focusing on quantifying and delivering the value of a manufacturing composite application platform to the Lighthammer target market.
The company’s new 8,000 square foot corporate headquarters in Exton, Pa., provides added office space, in addition to technology development and corporate demonstration space. The facility will accommodate growth across all departments into the future.
Founded in 2009, ThingWorx’s platform enables operational innovation in the areas of application development, problem solving and opportunity discovery and capture. ThingWorx’s disruptive technology provides all of the services and functionality required to quickly build and deploy secure, high-performance, connected applications regardless of whether they’re in the cloud, on an Intranet or on an embedded platform. The company’s platform extends the key functionality of Web 2.0, social media and the semantic web to the ‘world of things,’ creating a platform that amplifies the productivity of people through collective intelligence and user-driven information. The unique ability to link people and systems with the physical world unlocks tremendous value in industrial markets such as manufacturing, utilities and energy, as well as in emerging “Internet of Things” applications, which include smart homes, cities, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure.
About ThingWorx
ThingWorx™ is a privately held company that develops and markets the first application platform for the Connected World™. ThingWorx combines the key functionality of real-time data, mashups, search, social media and the semantic web, and applies it to any process that involves people, systems, devices and other real-world "things." ThingWorx is providing the disruptive change required to catalyze innovation and enable connected world applications, resulting in a step change in business performance. For more information contact us at www.thingworx.com or follow us on Twitter @ThingWorxSW