Industry Summary Articles

Scotch & Soda, the Dutch fashion company, has selected Centric Software to provide its product lifecycle management (PLM) software. The Amsterdam-based fashion brand will implement the Centric 8 PLM solution throughout its women’s wear, men’s wear and children’s wear product groups. Users will include styling, product development and sourcing teams. The company also will extend Centric 8 to its agents and suppliers. Scotch & Soda will use the Centric 8 PLM software for retail, apparel and footwear companies to support its growth and geographical expansion, according to Duco Habbema, head of sourcing. “Centric 8 will help to expand the product range, streamline the product development process, increase productivity, and improve collaboration within and between internal and external teams.” “Centric provides a solution that allows the design staff to remain creative while providing improved insight into the upcoming collection for buying and production teams,” Habbema says. “Additionally, Centric 8 will improve our ability to collaborate with agents

RLM Apparel Software Systems Inc. is welcoming three popular fashion brands to the fast-growing list of apparel, footwear and accessories companies that have selected the cloud-based FashionManager™ software solution to manage their concept-to-consumer operations. Thom Browne, a men's and women's wear design house based in New York, started in 2003 with traditional made-to-measure suits that have evolved into designs that have drawn attention from the fashion and design industries worldwide. The company launched men's ready-to-wear in 2004; followed by a women’s RTW collection in 2011. The designer has been honored with the CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year Award in 2006 and 2013, GQ Designer of the Year in 2008, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2012. Thom Browne collections are available through his flagships stores in NY and Tokyo as well as at designer specialty stores around the world. Inspired by contemporary art, fashion, music and film, Modern Vintage

Zuken Inc. has announced that major Taiwanese Design and Manufacturing Services (DMS) company has built a new design environment centering on CR-8000 Design Force based on a technical partnership with Zuken. Pegatron adopted Zuken's CR-8000 in 2012, and through technical cooperation with Zuken they integrated advanced automated design functions into CR-8000 Design Force based on design, verification and manufacturing know-how cultivated through many years of experience. As a result, remarkable achievements have already been made in terms of shortened project lead times and quality improvements. Based on these results, Pegatron has determined that their new PCB design flow based on CR-8000 exhibits performance far superior to that of other existing design systems and, moving forward, the company plans to accelerate full-out deployment efforts. Pegatron is now offering contracted design and manufacturing services to its customers through direct utilization of CR-8000 and CR-5000 data. They will exchange design data with their customers in CR-5000/CR-8000 data format. In

Infor announced on its quarterly Lender Update Friday, September 12, that fiscal 2015 Q1 software license fees and subscriptions revenue increased 22 percent at actual currency rates and in constant currency1 compared to its fiscal 2014 recast Q1. Non-GAAP Q1 license fees and subscriptions revenue2 increased 21 percent at actual currency rates and 20 percent in constant currency driven by strong license sales and continued momentum in software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the first quarter of Infor's fiscal year 2015. The areas of performance that showed the most momentum were the result of the continued drumbeat of Infor 10x product releases including Infor CloudSuiteTM, which was announced in March of this year. Bookings of SaaS subscription licenses more than doubled from the same quarter in FY14. This marked the first full quarter of sales for Infor CloudSuite, the first group of industry-specific application suites available on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud. Since its announcement in March,

Alain de Rouvray, ESI Group’s Chairman and CEO, comments: “The growing use of our Virtual Prototyping solutions, illustrated notably by the strength of New Business in the Licenses activity, was mitigated in the first half by adverse economic effects such as the persistence of significant foreign exchange impacts, the effects of the refocus of non-core Services and the one-off deferral of significant License contracts at year-end. These effects, which will attenuate during the second half, are not expected to undermine the Group’s business momentum, leaving intact the potential for revenue growth over the full year. We will therefore continue to follow with confidence our roadmap as a strategic and critical partner of major OEMs who aim to accelerate the elimination of physical prototypes in the development of innovative industrial products.” Second-quarter 2014 revenue: buoyant Licenses revenue Second-quarter 2014 revenue amounted to €22.5 million, a slight increase of 1.6% at constant exchange rates

Continuing with its Internet of Things strategy to enable customers to bring smart, connected products to market faster, PTC today announced that its Axeda Machine Cloud® technology was named 2014 Innovative Technology of the year for the Internet of Things by the Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) during the 2014 Technology Leadership Awards. PTC acquired Axeda in August 2014 for its leading-edge Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The PTC Axeda Machine Cloud® enables customers to cost-effectively and securely connect products to the cloud and then leverage the remote connectivity and data to provide world-class service, gain new business insights and deliver new innovative applications. “The MassTLC awards showcase the incredible innovation that takes place every day in Massachusetts that can then be adopted around the globe,” said Bill Zujewski, executive vice president, Axeda strategy, PTC. “The world is moving to smart connected products, and now as part of PTC and combining forces with ThingWorx, we

Stratasys Ltd. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held GrabCAD, Inc. in an all-cash transaction. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of September, subject to the fulfillment of customary closing conditions. Upon completion of the transaction, GrabCAD will operate as a unit within the Stratasys Global Products and Technology Group. Hardi Meybaum, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of GrabCAD, will continue to lead GrabCAD within the group. Founded in 2010 and led by Mr. Meybaum, an entrepreneur and pioneer in 3D CAD cloud collaboration tools, GrabCAD is helping engineers get products to market faster by connecting people, content and technology. GrabCAD offers GrabCAD Workbench, a cloud-based collaboration tool that enables engineers and designers to share, view and manage CAD files and other design data. GrabCAD is also home to a community of more than 1.5 million members from around

Derek Piette, Product Management Director, PTC Derek Piette is a Product Management Director at PTC and is currently responsible for the product direction of PTC’s System Requirements and Validation solution within the ALM Segment. Derek also manages the integration between Windchill and Integrity. He has spoken at numerous events on the topics of hardware-software interaction, electronics and high tech, and PTC’s product direction. Since joining PTC in 2003, Derek has held several positions within Product Management involving CAD data management, CAD integrations, requirements management, and complete product structures. Prior to joining PTC, Derek worked as an electrical and systems engineer for a semiconductor capital equipment supplier, KLA-Tencor. Derek attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering.  

ZW3D today announced the availability of ZW3D 2014 SP. This new version features more than 300 improvements in CAD and CAM modules, enabling users to design more flexibly and machine faster. Upgrading 3D Modeling with Optimized Functionalities Improvements of ZW3D 2014 SP cover every aspect of ZW3D’s CAD functions, such as upgraded file translator to support data interoperability with JT files, new part family to accelerate design of parts variations, new “Open in ZWCAD” feature to leverage specialized DWG functions and more enhanced modeling tools to provide interactive design environment. These customer-driven optimizations of ZW3D CAD can help users to conceptualize their creative ideas efficiently into products with less project budget and faster time-to-market. “ZW3D 2014 SP has much better drafting, so I end up importing concept models into ZW3D to detail,” commented Dave Dunkin, owner of Mossberg Ltd. “I love the sketch features in ZW3D.” Strengthening CNC Machining with Enhanced Operations The latest developments

VCollab announced enhanced model compare capabilities in the latest release of the VCollab product suite. These enhancements help engineers to easily find, study, document and present the differences in the CAE results as well as the differences in the geometries/meshes during design changes. The enhanced model compare capabilities now allow for comparison of CAE results from different models and comparison of geometry models from different sources. Comparing CAE results from different design alternatives enables VCollab users to not only get information about the differences in the minimum and maximum values efficiently, but also to assess easily where these differences/hotspots occur. Models to be compared don't have to use the same underlying mesh nor do the shapes have to be the same. Other use of this functionality includes comparisons of different solvers or load cases for the same model. VCollab model compare further allows for comparison of different model geometries including CAD-CAD model comparisons,