Today's digital-savvy consumers are driving corporations to re-imagine their business models. We all expect the products they produce to integrate into our lives, to work in more personal ways, and to adapt to our individual needs.

The advent of smarter products

In response to these dynamic buyer behaviors, product companies are accelerating innovation in embedded software control – the new “brains” that make products smarter. When software is effectively fused with micro-electronic, sensor, and mechanical technologies, products become increasingly intelligent, real-time instrumented, and interconnected. They can:

• Respond to changes more accurately by predicting and optimizing for future events
• Measure, sense, and see the exact condition of everything
• Interact with other products, people, and IT systems in entirely new ways

Smart products adapt to the unique needs of businesses and people

Manufacturing company or software company?

Software is the ‘invisible thread’ critical to sustaining product innovation and competitiveness. Every company is transforming into a software and systems integration company. Approximately 66% of products delivered last year relied on software as a key differentiator.

On a smarter planet, success is tied to how well businesses can harness instrumentation, interconnectedness, analytics, software, and system intelligence to deliver differentiating value.

The perils of not getting it right

This transformation is sparking unprecedented leaps in product value. However, designing sophisticated products can engineer new opportunities to fail. An airplane can contain some six million lines of software code, equivalent to a three-story-high pile of books, in which a single spelling error can have serious consequences.

For the world’s manufacturers, software plays a significant role in customer satisfaction, safety ratings, product reliability, profitability and risk, and their overall image as an innovator.