Unfortunately, I can only attend one day of PTC's three-day Global Media Event, being held in Long Beach, Calif. This morning's presentations covered the business side of things. It was said that 2,046 registrants from some 24 countries attended the conference. First to speak was the President of PTC's World User group Dan Glenn. He says there are plenty of active user portals and technical communities. The company has restructured the regional user groups -- only active members are now represented.
Customers of PTC include ABB, Seimens, Boeing, HP, Rolex, Motorola, Harley Davidson, Dell, and Liz Clairborn. PTC is opening a new development center in China to take advantage of that new consumer base.
"How are companies to succeed?" asks the second speaker. By using technology that supports ROI. In other words, each of the six product families: Windchill, Pro/E, CoCreate, Arbotext, MathCAD, and ProductView.
For customer satisfaction, the company has been rated by an independant firm at 7.0 out of a possible 10 -- "right in the middle of the pack for technology companies." Globally, there are 800,000 seats of Windchill and 1.5 M users. Revenue growth has been 14% over the last 3 years.
PTC practices what it preaches in terms of the globalization of product development -- it has 1,700 engineers in India, Asia, and China, and other countries overseas, and is focusing on IT consolidation so global interaction is better.
Two new products were announced:
Windchill ProductPoint, which sits inside Microsoft SharePoint. ProductPoint 1.0 Beta in Aug 2008.
Windows SharePoint Services a technology suite that was not good for understanding CAD files structures. But a lot of companies use it to share documents. Sharepoint now understands what CAD is saying:
Windchill ProductPoint Server:
Windows SharePoint Services, a portal, can share documents,
Windchill adds tab for products where you can see thumbnails of files
Filters to find files
Embedded visualization
Can see assembly structures "under the hood" Wildfire 4.0 is integrated with it, so you can quickly search and find assembly components.
Windchill PDMLink, Windchill ProductPoint, Windchill PLM Connector: PLM solutions for varying size companies.
ProductPoint -- simple, general purpose, standalone and integral (the pieces are made to work together). It does not replace Pro/Intralink, PDMLink, ProjectLink
And:
ProductView 9.1
View, markup tool, MCAD, ECAD, document formats.
Standalone, integral with Windchill, and 2.5 GByte file in ProductView gets compressed to a few MBytes.
Is easy to run queries and the software color-codes model based on the query. For example, all parts that are behind schedule turn red.
500,000 components can run in one session!
ProductView is in Windchill 9.1 -- mouse-over icons and see what part it is, where it is used, all its children, can drag columns to increase their size.
Lastly, enhancements for Pro/Engineer : flexible modeling for Wildfire 6.0. will allow freeform sculpting or conceptualizing the shape as you go. What is created is not an STL or a faceted model -- it is Pro/E surfaces from which you can make a solid model.