CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

8 June 2009

Acquisitions

PTC Expands Product Analytics Strategy with Acquisition of Relex Software Corporation

PTC announced it has acquired Relex Software Corporation (Relex®), based in Greensburg, PA. Relex provides software and services for analyzing design and field data in order to assist in evaluating and improving product reliability and safety. Relex products and services are used by thousands of engineers in a variety of businesses around the globe, including aerospace & defense, medical equipment, telecommunications, electronics and high-tech, automotive, and industrial equipment. The company was privately held and had approximately 50 employees. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. With this acquisition, PTC continues to execute its product analytics strategy, broadening its family of solutions to include product reliability in addition to environmental compliance.

Product reliability and maintainability are two key factors that influence how a product will perform and ultimately succeed in the field. Market drivers, including brand reputation, increased product complexity, total cost of ownership, warranty penalty cost and safety, are compelling manufacturers to focus on predicting, analyzing, and improving product reliability and maintainability. As a result, there is growing demand for solutions that will enable manufacturers to gain early insight into potential risk and reliability issues, predict reliability performance early in the design process, and track reliability against targets during product development. Further, companies need tools and methods that help strengthen communication of field performance data to design engineering for trends analysis and to incorporate reliability analysis considerations into the engineering change process to help avoid changes late in the design process.

Founded in 1986 with a clear and simple mission to provide reliability analysis excellence, Relex has a history of innovation and is recognized for its leadership, vision, and commitment to providing an out-of-the-box suite of reliability solutions and services.

Benefits delivered by Relex solutions include:

• Early Reliability Planning and Risk Assessment
• Reliability Prediction and Simulation
• Reliability Reporting
• Closed-Loop Field Performance Feedback

The Relex acquisition is a key component of PTC’s product analytics strategy. In today’s competitive world, product development organizations are under constant pressure to comply with international environmental regulations, reliability and maintainability requirements, while lowering lifecycle and product costs. Decisions made to optimize one dimension are likely to impact performance on these other dimensions. These pressures are the impetus for PTC’s product analytics strategy.

By offering customers solutions that allow them to analyze across a series of product performance dimensions early in the product’s lifecycle, PTC empowers them to make sound tradeoff decisions based on the aggregation of data from a variety of sources (e.g. supplier information, estimated data, field data, or data from component standards). With product analytics software, PTC aims to provide a comprehensive solution to streamline prediction and analysis of product performance, provide visibility to product development stakeholders and enable effective tradeoff studies.

“The natural synergy between product lifecycle management and reliability engineering makes Relex a logical addition to PTC’s evolving product analytics family of solutions and underscores PTC’s holistic approach to product development,” said James Heppelmann, president and chief operating officer, PTC. “This acquisition benefits PTC customers by enabling them to incorporate critical reliability analysis capabilities as part of a total solution to help them further optimize their product development processes.”

“Relex solutions help leading companies of all sizes and across many industries improve their ability to predict and measure product reliability, enabling them to proactively address possible reliability and safety issues throughout the product lifecycle,” said Kevin Van Fleet, co-founder, Relex Software Corporation. “The incorporation of Relex solutions into PTC’s product analytics strategy will help companies to make better quality, more informed decisions to drive success with product development initiatives.”

Availability

Relex solutions are immediately available stand-alone as they were prior to the acquisition. To execute on its broader product analytics vision, PTC plans to combine the Relex solutions with its product analytics solutions as well as developing integrations between Relex and other components in the PTC product development system.

For more information about the acquisition, please visit: http://www.ptc.com/company/relex.

About Relex Software Corporation

After more than two decades of growth and experience, Relex Software Corporation has a full suite of 11 software tools in the global marketplace covering the full life cycle of user products. Relex Reliability Studio tools include Reliability Prediction, Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Fault Tree, Weibull, Markov, Life Cycle Cost (LCC), Human Factors Risk Analysis, Maintainability Prediction, Optimization and Simulation (OpSim), and Failure Reporting, Analysis, and Corrective Action System (FRACAS). As a full solution provider, Relex Software also offers reliability engineering consulting services and training programs.

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