Industrial Software: PLM, CAD, MES and the Industrial IoT

Every physical product now starts as a file and every modern factory runs on software, and the companies that own those files and systems have become some of the most valuable in manufacturing. The design and simulation layer consolidated sharply in 2025: Siemens completed its purchase of the US simulation company Altair in Mar 2025 for an enterprise value of ~$10bn, and Synopsys, the chip-design software company, completed its ~$35bn acquisition of Ansys on 17 Jul 2025 (company releases, reported) — both betting that designing a product, its chips and its behaviour will merge into one simulated model. The industrial-internet layer went the other way: GE's Predix platform, launched in 2015 to make GE a leading software company, never became one (General Electric), and PTC, which had bet on the industrial IoT with ThingWorx (2013) and Kepware (2015), sold both to TPG, closing on 16 Mar 2026 with $523m of cash at closing (company release; TPG combined them with GE Vernova's former Proficy software as Velotic, reported); on 5 Oct 2026 PTC itself agreed to be bought by Schneider Electric for $205 a share in cash (~$22.6bn equity value, ~$23.7bn enterprise value; close expected Q3 2027, subject to PTC holders and regulators — trade press). In between sit computer-aided design (Autodesk, PTC, Dassault Systèmes, Siemens), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and ERP on the shop floor, digital twins and, increasingly, AI copilots that write code and suggest designs. And because factories are now networks, software is also how they are stopped: a cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (Tata Motors) halted its plants for weeks from about 31 Aug–1 Sep 2025 (verify start) and cost the UK economy an estimated ~£1.9bn (Cyber Monitoring Centre, Oct 2025). This section maps the software, explains its business model (subscriptions, lock-in and consolidation), tells the IoT disappointment and what survived it, covers MES, digital twins and OT cybersecurity, and gives questions for reading industrial-software claims.