Here's something you might see at a pricey electronica music festival: a loud and sophisticated laser show with dancing robots. Except this wasn't Coachella or anything like it. This was at LiveWorx, the four-day tech conference hosted at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center by Needham-based PTC, a publicly traded software company.
PTC started in 1985 as a computer-aided design software company, but it has evolved over time, in part because of a series of acquisitions, to provide software covering every part of a product's lifecycle (what's known in the industry as lifecycle management). More notably, the company had made a big move in the past few years into the Internet of Things, augmented reality and virtual reality as a way to help its engineering customers maintain their products in new ways.
PTC's transformation into an IoT, AR and VR software provider has paid off: PTC's stock price has increased 185 percent to $55.93 a share this morning, from $19.62 in October 2010, when its current CEO, Jim Heppelmann, took the helm.
