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

A new generation of smart products and services

In response to these dynamic buyer behaviors, companies are accelerating innovation in the embedded software that makes products smarter, and in the back-end software services to which these products are connected. Together, smart products and services form an intelligent ecosystem that delivers maximum value and flexibility to users.

When software is effectively fused with microelectronics, sensors, and mechanical technologies, products become increasingly intelligent, 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.

Creating new value with a system of systems

In today's complex and rapidly evolving world, it's often impossible to deliver a single system that satisfies a constantly changing set of requirements across the entire value chain.

Consider a smart grid, which needs to integrate multiple independent products and systems to perform its job. Smart meters, smart appliances, and smart homes, all containing embedded software, will be interconnected with numerous back-end software applications to create significant new value for consumers, businesses, and the public.

Systems engineering is key to smart products

Effective integration of software with mechanical, electronic, and electrical engineering is an increasingly critical success factor, requiring a framework for collaboration and visibility across diverse, globally distributed teams. The framework must enable a unified collaborative effort spanning the entire product lifecycle, including requirements, architecture, development, change management, quality management, and product and portfolio management.