Item 1. Business

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PTC is a global software and services company that delivers solutions to power our industrial customers' digital transformations, enabling them to better design, manufacture, operate, and service their products. Our Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality (AR) solutions enable companies to connect factories and plants, smart products, and enterprise systems to transform their businesses. These products, along with Onshape, are considered our Growth Products. The primary products in our Core Products portfolio are innovative Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions that enable manufacturers to create, innovate, and service products. Our Focused Solutions Group (FSG) is a family of software products that target specific vertical industries where we can deliver unique domain expertise and a competitive advantage with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) products, Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) products, and other niche tailored solutions. Together, these technologies power the digital thread across industrial enterprises.

We also continue to expand our solution offerings to address the most pressing business problems our customers confront. These solutions are being designed to aggregate technology from across our portfolio as well as from other companies, including our key partners.

Our business is based on a subscription business model, which provides flexibility to customers and increases predictability and consistency of billings for PTC. Our customer success program partners with customers to enable successful deployment and use of our solutions.

We generate revenue through the sale of software subscriptions, which include license access and support (technical support and software updates); support for existing perpetual licenses; professional services (consulting, implementation, and training); and cloud services (hosting for our software and SaaS).

Our Strategy

There are three key elements to our strategy to deliver long-term shareholder value.

Align with market demand to build a strong pipeline. We believe demand for solutions such as ours that enable work from home, global team and supply chain collaboration, remote asset management, and remote frontline worker training and support is strong.

Optimize new and renewal sales and customer success to power top line ARR growth. FY’20 marked the third consecutive year of double-digit ARR growth, despite the extreme volatility of PMIs and the macroeconomic environment that occurred during the same time frame. In the past year, we have accelerated our digital marketing and sales capabilities.

Create an efficient business model and operation that enable us to drive free cash flow growth. As we have completed our subscription transition, we see greater ARR stability and continue to drive operational efficiencies.

Our Principal Products and Services

Growth Products

Our ThingWorx® IIoT platform delivers end-to-end capabilities that enable customers to address every facet of their digital transformation journey, enabling them to transform their operations, products, and services—and unlock new business models. ThingWorx enables customers to reduce the time, cost, and risk required to build and deploy IIoT applications; easily and more securely connect devices, systems, and applications; build applications quickly and at enterprise scale; analyze IIoT data to proactively optimize operations; manage connected devices, processes and systems; and create digital and AR experiences. ThingWorx Solution Central is a centralized portal in the cloud that allows users of ThingWorx to efficiently discover, deploy, and manage ThingWorx applications across the enterprise from a single location, which allows for cost-effective, efficient, and version-controlled management of applications. Our ThingWorx Kepware® product enables users to connect, manage, monitor, and control disparate devices and software applications. ThingWorx also offers sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning technology that enables customers to simplify and automate complex analytical processes, enhancing IIoT solutions through real-time insights, predictions and recommendations from information collected from smart, connected things. ThingWorx also includes AR capabilities that superimpose IoT digital information on a human’s view of the physical world, enabling valuable insights. PTC was named a leader in IIoT platforms in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions’ 2020 SPARK Matrix, and Forrester’s 2019 Wave.

Our Vuforia® enterprise AR platform and wide-ranging solution suite enable industrial enterprise customers to address workforce challenges and meet business goals. Our Vuforia Studio™ product is a powerful, easy-to-use, cloud-based tool that enables industrial enterprises to rapidly author and publish augmented reality experiences. These augmented reality experiences overlay important digital information from IoT, CAD, and other sources onto the view of the physical things on which users work. Our Vuforia Expert Capture™ product chronicles the real-time movements of a person wearing an AR headset by monitoring the individual both audio-visually and spatially in three dimensions. Vuforia Expert Capture supports a variety of industrial use cases, such as creating step-by-step operating or repair instructions, procedural guidance, and hands-on training. The Vuforia suite also includes the Vuforia Engine™ technology for application development, Vuforia Chalk™ collaboration and remote assistance solution, and Vuforia Spatial Toolbox™ technology to accelerate the development of spatial computing prototypes and use cases. PTC was named a leader in AR platforms in ABI Research’s 2019 Competitive Assessment and Teknowlogy’s PAC RADAR assessment.

Our Onshape® Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product development platform unites computer-aided design with data management, collaboration tools, and real-time analytics. A cloud-native multi-tenant solution that can be instantly deployed on virtually any computer or mobile device, Onshape enables teams to work together from anywhere. Real-time design reviews, commenting, and simultaneous editing enable a collaborative workflow where multiple design iterations can be completed in parallel and merged into the final design.

Core Products

Our Creo® interoperable suite of product design software provides a scalable set of packages for design engineers to meet a variety of specialized needs. Creo provides capabilities for generative design, real-time simulation (through our collaboration with ANSYS), additive manufacturing, design flexibility, advanced assembly design, piping and cabling design, advanced surfacing, comprehensive virtual prototyping and other essential design functions. Our Creo solutions also include augmented and virtual reality through a native cloud-dependent integration with our Vuforia® augmented reality (AR) solution. With every seat of Creo, our customers can create and publish AR experiences and share their designs instantly to collaborate with anyone across the entire enterprise around the world on virtually any device.

Our Windchill® suite of PLM software enables efficient and consistent product data management from inception through design, as well as communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise, including product development, manufacturing and the supply chain. Windchill offers a single repository for product information, thus providing a “single source of truth” for product-related content such as CAD models, documents, technical illustrations, embedded software, calculations, and requirement specifications for all phases of the product lifecycle to help companies streamline enterprise-wide communication and make informed decisions. As the “single source of truth,” Windchill provides the digital thread that connects the full product lifecycle. Windchill also includes augmented reality (AR) capabilities, enabling customers to build a digital product definition and publish the representation of the resulting product in AR. Using AR in the product development process connects the digital model to the physical product to determine real-time behavior, conduct product design reviews in real-world environments, and share the product definition with disparate stakeholders. PTC was named a leader in PLM in Quadrant Knowledge Solutions’ 2019 SPARK Matrix.

Focused Group Products (FSG)

Our IntegrityTM application lifecycle management (ALM) and model-based systems engineering capabilities enable users to manage system models, software configurations, test plans and defects.

Our Servigistics® service parts management solution enables customers to effectively manage service parts, improve their products and services, and increase customer satisfaction.

Strategic Alliances

Building an ecosystem of partners is becoming increasingly important as we expand the capabilities of our core solutions and IIoT offerings and expand our addressable markets by leveraging our partner sales and services distribution channels.

We partner with Rockwell Automation to align our respective smart factory technologies to address the market for smart, connected operations, with particular focus on the plant and factory setting. The companies’ primary joint offering, FactoryTalk InnovationSuite Powered by PTC, is the industry’s first comprehensive digital transformation software suite that offers fully integrated IIoT, edge-to-cloud analytics, manufacturing execution systems (MES), and AR. In October 2020, we expanded our strategic alliance with Rockwell Automation to include our PLM and SaaS products to streamline both companies’ commercial efforts to extend a comprehensive digital thread solution, from upfront design through operation and maintenance. PTC will also offer Rockwell Automation’s virtual machinery simulation and testing software to its own customers and partners. Rockwell Automation has exclusive rights to resell certain of our solutions to certain customers and geographic regions. In connection with this strategic alliance, in 2018 Rockwell Automation made a $1 billion equity investment in PTC.

We partner with Microsoft to make the ThingWorx® Industrial Innovation Platform available on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform as our preferred cloud platform. By partnering with Microsoft, we are able to leverage the two companies’ complementary technologies and together pursue opportunities in industrial sectors. This integration enables us to deliver a combined and connected solution for IIoT and digital product lifecycle management that enables companies to bring new products to market faster, enhance customer service, and introduce new revenue streams, while reducing operating costs.

In Q3’20, we expanded our strategic alliances with Microsoft and Rockwell Automation into a three-way alliance to take to market a new class of IIoT solutions called Factory Insights as a Service. Factory Insights as a Service is a turnkey cloud solution that enables manufacturers to achieve significant impact, speed, and scale with their digital transformation initiatives.

We partner with ANSYS to embed Ansys' Discovery Live real-time simulation within Creo, enabling us to offer a fully-integrated CAD and real-time simulation solution. We are also working towards integrating Ansys’s broader Discovery AIM suite with the Creo suite.

Our Markets and How We Address Them

We compete in the IIoT, AR, CAD and PLM markets. The markets we serve present different growth opportunities for us. We see greater opportunity for market growth for our IIoT and AR solutions for the enterprise, followed by more moderate market growth for our CAD and PLM solutions.

We derive most of our sales from products and services sold directly by our sales force to end-user customers. Approximately 30% to 35% of our sales of products and services are through third-party resellers. Our sales force focuses on large accounts, while our reseller channel provides a cost-effective means of covering the small- and medium-size business market. Our strategic services partners provide service offerings to help customers implement our product offerings. As we grow our IIoT business, we expect that our go-to-market strategy will rely more on selling through partners, including the types of strategic partners described above, and marketing directly to end users and developers.

Additional financial information about our segments and international and domestic operations may be found in Note 18. Segment and Geographic Information of Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements in this Form 10-K, which information is incorporated herein by reference.

Competition

We compete with a number of companies whose offerings address one or more specific functional areas covered by our solutions. In our IIoT business, we compete with large established companies such as Amazon, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Siemens AG, Software AG, and GE. There are also a number of smaller companies that compete in the market for IIoT products. For enterprise CAD and PLM solutions, we compete with companies including Autodesk, Dassault Systèmes SA, and Siemens AG. For PLM solutions, we also compete with Oracle and SAP, but we believe our products are more specifically targeted toward the business process challenges of manufacturing companies and offer broader and deeper functionality for those processes than ERP-based solutions. For our AR products, our primary competitors include Microsoft, Upskill, Ubimax, ScopeAR and Re’Flekt.

Proprietary Rights

Our software products and related technical know-how, along with our trademarks, including our company names, product names and logos, are proprietary. We protect our intellectual property rights in these items by relying on copyrights, trademarks, patents and common law safeguards, including trade secret protection. The nature and extent of such legal protection depends in part on the type of intellectual property right and the relevant jurisdiction. In the U.S., we are generally able to maintain our trademark registrations for as long as the trademarks are in use and to maintain our patents for up to 20 years from the earliest effective filing date. We also use license management and other anti-piracy technology measures, as well as contractual restrictions, to curtail the unauthorized use and distribution of our products.

Our proprietary rights are subject to risks and uncertainties described under Item 1A. “Risk Factors” below. You should read that discussion, which is incorporated into this section by reference.

Employees

As of September 30, 2020, we had 6,243 employees, including 1,949 in research and development; 1,679 in customer support, training, consulting, cloud services and product distribution; 1,866 in sales and marketing; and 749 in general and administration. Of these employees, 2,315 were in the United States; 2,218 in the Asia Pacific region, including 1,501 in India; 1,566 in Europe; and 144 in the Americas (excluding the U.S.).

As a software company, our employees are a significant asset and we aim to create an environment that is equitable, inclusive and representative in which our employees can grow and advance their careers, with the overall goal of developing, expanding and retaining our workforce to support our business.

Inclusion and Diversity. We have prioritized inclusion and diversity (I&D) as part of our corporate-wide strategic goals. Strategies we’ve taken to create and sustain a more inclusive and diverse environment include: hiring a dedicated head of I&D; expanding our recruiting efforts at schools and job fairs focused on minorities and other diversity dimensions; and launching, expanding and supporting our Employee Resource Groups—groups of PTC employees that voluntarily join together based on shared characteristics, life experiences, or interest around particular activities.

Workforce Planning and Retention. Our efforts to recruit and retain a diverse and passionate workforce include providing competitive compensation and benefit packages worldwide and ensuring we listen to our employees. To that end, we regularly survey our employees to obtain their views and assess employee satisfaction. We use the views expressed in the surveys to influence our people strategy and policies. We also use employee survey information, headcount data and cost analyses to gain insights into how and where we work.

Website Access to Reports and Code of Business Conduct and Ethics

We make available free of charge on our website at www.ptc.com the following reports as soon as reasonably practicable after electronically filing them with, or furnishing them to, the SEC: our Annual Reports on Form 10-K; our Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q; our Current Reports on Form 8-K; and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Our Proxy Statements for our Annual Meetings and Section 16 trading reports on SEC Forms 3, 4 and 5 also are available on our website. The reference to our website is not intended to incorporate information on our website into this Annual Report by reference.

Our Code of Ethics for Senior Executive Officers is embedded in our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics, which is also available on our website. Additional information about this code and amendments and waivers thereto can be found below in Part III, Item 10 of this Annual Report.

Executive Officers

Information about our executive officers is incorporated by reference from our 2021 Proxy Statement.

Corporate Information

PTC was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1985 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.