Octave Live OnTour Munich: Octave’s New Platform Could Secure It A Greater Share Of Customer Wallet

One of Octave’s strongest assets is that it owns the Design, Build, Operate and Protect data records its modules depend on, creating an incredibly sticky solution (with a 97% gross retention rate) as switching costs are measured in decades of reference data. This sets up the perfect environment for Octave’s new platform to effectively cross-sell its offerings. Only around 14% of Octave’s customers span all of its Design, Build, Operate and Protect pillars, yet they account for about half of revenue, with Octave highlighting that ARR per customer rises from around $150,000 with one pillar to $2 million+ with three or more. Now, with its platform release, the vendor’s goal will be to move customers using a single pillar – currently accounting for around 86% of its base – onto two or more to meet its growth targets.

The critical challenge for Octave in cross-selling its pillars is how different the stakeholders are for each. This will require Octave to thread the capabilities together within each customer, rather than relying on separate businesses each selling to their own audience.

A services-based model is where Octave should continue to invest to help bring these stakeholders together, shifting the platform from selling a connected thread as a product to delivering it as a service that draws on Octave’s industry domain expertise. CoLabs, Octave’s customer co-development programme, could act as a foundation and launching platform for this more aggressive services push. In CoLabs, customers work with Octave on agentic AI and innovation projects and get early access to new solutions, running 11-week projects that target completion with a validated economic benefit.

Octave plans to differentiate these projects from the forward-deployed engineer model popular in AI through its ownership of the data and more systemic adoption of AI tools across the platform. Octave’s services teams are also scaling for data migration, while schema-scanning tooling will help bring data from other pillars and third-party sources onto the platform. Together, these could underpin cross-sell, with CoLabs putting Octave’s teams in front of the Design, Build, Operate and Protect stakeholders at once – and also proving the economic benefit and migration tooling that would lower the effort of bringing each additional pillar’s data onto the platform.

Octave will need to show more AI use cases that bridge its pillars if the platform is to support cross-sell. Of the four use cases shown at its Munich event (intelligent P&ID review, work package optimization, alarm rationalization and simultaneous operations), only work package optimization spans more than one pillar (Design and Build). The others sit within just the Design or Operate pillars, even as they draw on cross-pillar data. Single-pillar wins prove the value of an individual product, but don’t help shift customers onto additional pillars, one of the core goals of the platform release.

As industrial software vendors towards more connected platforms, customers will only expand on these when they see outcomes that depend on connected data and workflows from multiple domains, not merely off the value proposition of ‘connection’ for connection’s sake. Octave needs to continue to highlight where cross-pillar data drive the outcomes and add use cases that combine workflows across the pillars. For more information on Octave’s positioning in the market, check out Verdantix Green Quadrant: Process Safety Management Software (2026).