PTC Buys Qualcomm’s Vuforia to Add Augmented Reality to IoT Biz

BV Bigelow photo

In a day where EMC’s $67 billion sale to Dell dominated headlines, another New England company made a less attention-grabbing acquisition that advances its move into the “Internet of Things.”

PTC (NASDAQ: [[ticker:PTC]]), a Needham, MA-based company best known for its computer-aided design and product development software, said it’s buying Vuforia, Qualcomm’s vision-based augmented reality technology, for $65 million.

San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]]) has been developing Vuforia since 2010. As Qualcomm Vice President Jay Wright explained in 2011, Vuforia combines augmented reality software and hardware technologies so that 3-D virtual images and video content can be superimposed over the real world as it is viewed in real time through the camera of a smartphone or tablet.

At that time, Wright said Qualcomm was encouraging developers to create apps that could use Vuforia in mobile games, media and advertising, education, facial recognition, and navigation.

PTC sees Vuforia as the industry’s most advanced and widely adopted augmented reality platform. Mobile app developers in 130 countries support Vuforia, and have created more than 20,000 apps that have been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide.

For all that effort, however, there have been precious few examples of mobile games or advertisements that became a runaway success because of the way they used augmented reality technology. In announcing the deal, Qualcomm and PTC highlighted how augmented reality would be coupled with PTC’s expertise in the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics platforms.

While PTC has traditionally focused on developing 2-D and 3-D product design software and services to manage those products, the company has lately been emphasizing its role in the development of IoT products and services.

“Vuforia unlocks a world of possibilities for creating new ways to design products, to monitor and control products, and to instruct operators and technicians in the appropriate methods of use and service,” PTC says in a press release.

Meanwhile, Qualcomm has been looking for businesses it can shed as it tries to reorganize its operations following years of unrestrained growth. The wireless giant announced in mid-July that it would cut about 15 percent of its global workforce, or as many as 4,700 employees, as part of an initiative intended to shave about $1.1 billion in costs.

The deal is expected to close before the end of the year. Wright plans to move to PTC and continue running the Vuforia business, the companies said.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.