How PTC Moved 15 Years of Community to Gainsight

Olivier Le Pord has spent the better part of two decades running online communities: Autodesk, Alteryx, and for the last five years PTC, where his community of hundreds of thousands of members sits inside the support organization and lives and dies by case deflection. So when the platform underneath all of it was acquired in mid-2025, Olivier did what someone who’s seen a few migrations does: he started reading. What he learned about the new owner’s direction unsettled him. The roadmap was tilting somewhere he didn’t want to take a community of mechanical engineers, and his contract was up in under a year.

Olivier was up against a time crunch, and he had to navigate the scar tissue left by a past community migration. Wait past the renewal window and the cost would climb. Move now, and he’d have to convince several layers of management — whose memories of a brutal 2017 migration were still fresh — that they should be comfortable about the timeline and the price. Olivier made the case on three fronts: the incumbent was heading the wrong way strategically, it was shedding the technical resources he relied on, and every month of delay made the renewal more expensive. In the end, the pain of migrating was judged to be less than the pain of renewing, and the team began evaluating other community platforms. Behind the strategy sat a heavier problem: fifteen years of community history, with forums dating to 2012 and traces reaching back further, had to move without losing the dense, technical content PTC’s engineers depend on.

The team chose Gainsight after a competitive RFP, based on both its capabilities and the strong strategic signals coming out of the company. The people now building community at Gainsight were people Olivier had known and trusted for a decade. The team proceeded with an API-based migration rather than a bulk data dump, and Andy Kenefick, PTC’s technical lead on the project, carried the build. Andy was struck by how organized the whole migration process was. Gainsight came to the table with the questions already answered and a step-by-step task board waiting. “It was a really pleasant surprise how smoothly everything went,” he said, and not just with Gainsight: PTC’s own IT and SSO teams showed up for him in a way that built relationships he expects to lean on for years. Through nearly every meeting, a Gainsight VP was in the room, someone Olivier had known for over a decade, a level of access that turned technical questions into fast decisions.

The PTC community went live in early April, on its three-month timeline. It’s early, but the trajectory is what excites Olivier. Early user feedback has been encouraging. As Olivier put it: “People like the refreshed look. It’s a change, but not everything is unfamiliar, and that’s coming through in our community survey.”

PTC now runs Gainsight Customer Communities alongside Customer Success, with plans to connect the two over the summer. And within days of launch, Andy had stood up the new Communities MCP server and a custom Copilot agent to pull product insights out of the community for PTC’s product managers.

For Olivier, the migration’s real significance is strategic, and it lines up with a shift coming from the top of PTC. “Our new CEO has made customer feedback a real priority, and suddenly the community is hot for that,” he said. “Marketing, voice of the customer, product management: they all want more insight out of it, and Gainsight is well equipped to give it.” The platform, as he put it, is suited for where PTC, and a company increasingly built around customer feedback, is heading next.