Taken in context of the presentation, they're looking to expand from the design process into the procurement and manufacturing processes. They already have a ton of the design tool market captured, so it makes a lot of sense for them to get into procurement tools (Octopart) and manufacturing management tools (Ciiva), because ultimately those are all very closely related. These are sensible lateral expansions into adjacent product areas, whereas expanding into PCB fabrication, IC design, semiconductor manufacturing, etc, would all be much more substantial vertical moves.
Honestly, there is a real opportunity to provide legitimate value to the users by providing better integration of the design, procurement, and manufacturing management areas, and that was the ostensible reason for the acquisitions of Octopart and Ciiva. Honestly I would love to have better procurement and BOM management tools right there in my CAD software, but only time will tell if Altium will turn this strategy into something really useful to the majority of their customers, or something that is useful but far too expensive (like Nexus/Vaults), or if it ultimately becomes a dead-end boondoggle like the FPGA/MCU tool integration.
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