PTC acquires IncQuery Group for ALM business

PTC also announced an acquisition today, one that appears more of a tuck-in than a new-industry-maker: It has acquired IncQuery Group, which offers application lifecycle management (ALM) and systems engineering products and services.

Neil Barua, PTC’s CEO, said, “The acquisition of IncQuery Group strengthens our focus on engineering and product development and adds expertise to help accelerate our ALM and PLM portfolio integrations and better support our customers.” PTC’s release adds that the acquisition continues PTC’s momentum in ALM, following the release of its Codebeamer 3.0 ALM solution and the ongoing development of its Codebeamer AI offering.

I was not aware of IncQuery, so did a little digging. The company is based in Hungary and was formed by alumni of the Fault-Tolerant Systems Research Group at Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). For a bunch of academic techies, they’ve had remarkable success: “Over the years, we have … built a strong network with global companies across various industries. Our successful collaborations with companies such as Airbus, BSH, Ericsson, Honda, logi.cals, NASA JPL, Siemens, Thales, ThyssenKrupp, as well as our participation in EU research projects such as OpenCPS and our entry into industrial memberships like AUTOSAR, NI Alliance (both in 2017), OMG, and ISO 9001 (both in 2019), attest to our commitment to excellence and innovation.”

Products include IncQuery Integrator, a toolkit that creates custom automation solutions for handover processes between engineering silos; IncQuery Validator for CATIA Magic, which provides model governance for MBSE workflows; and IncQuery Validator for Enterprise Architect, which is used for engineering quality assurance for groups using the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect platform. [I don’t know what that is, but I intend to find out.]

IncQuery also seems to have a thriving services business, with lots of case studies — look here for more info — in both industry and the broader PLMish software space.

Terms of the deal were not announced, but it appears from PTC’s press release that this is a done deal.