The movie “Iron Man 3” just showed up on pay cable this week, and I had to watch it again. (Better than 2, worse than 1, in my opinion.) For those who did not see it, or could care less, the lead character, who has a sky high Q rating, meets a kid and refers to himself as “The Mechanic.” In some ways this is true, because throughout all three films, Tony Stark (played wonderfully by Robert Downey Jr.) is always making and fixing things. He anthropomorphizes his industrial robots, talking to them (and they seem to understand), and even putting a Dunce cap on one in this latest installment. And they help him do his bidding in his formidable workshop.
OK, all fine and dandy, you might be saying, but what does this have to do with PLM? Over the last 12-18 months, CIMdata has had calls with a number of solution and service providers who you could say are the mechanics of PLM. They just make stuff work. They provide integrations, testing services, engineering services, and a whole range of other products and services, garnering revenues that do not make CIMdata’s market leaders charts. But the products offered by those market leaders would not work, or at least not work as well, without the skills and efforts of these often unseen companies.
One such company is I-Cubed (http://www.i-cubed.com/). They have been in business since 1984, and are privately held. The roots of the company are in CAD, built on the work of their founder, Grant Willard, whose senior research project at North Carolina State was funded by IBM. This first product, CAD-PACK, enabled mainframe CADAM emulation on a user’s desktop. It lives on today as Revisio. Over the years they have partnered with Autodesk, Adobe, and most notably PTC. They first licensed drafting technology to PTC in 1997, and then PTC used I-Cubed technology in their CAD integrations in 1999. This integration work led to a 2001 contract to develop PTCs CAD Workgroup Managers. ISVs often use third parties for integration to competitors’ products, since their competitors are often resistant to such cooperation.
As often happens with CAD integration partnerships, these offerings are sold by PTC on their price list. Customers want “one throat to choke.” But while software ISVs want to sell and implement things themselves, they often lack the skills to do so. This provided an opening for I-Cubed to expand beyond their tight relationship with PTCs R&D organization to sales and services. Today they are members of three PTC partnership programs: Strategic Migration Partner, Platinum Software Partner, and a ServiceAdvantage Partner (in North America and Europe). Their intimate knowledge of Windchill allowed them to build other migration tools and offer migration services to users of CAD tools and other PDM systems who want to migrate to Windchill. This facility with integration has led them to other partnerships with Adobe and Convertigo, an enterprise mashup application development platform. I-Cubed also does work migrating and cleaning dirty product data for industrial clients, which they claim is a growth area for the firm.
How are they doing? Quite well, thank you, according to Donald Thompson, their CEO. They are working to expand on this significant knowledge and technology base to grow their business. Results over the last few years show that they are succeeding. Their most recent move is to partner with Aras, an open source PLM solution provider that is starting to shake up the PLM Economy. According to the I-Cubed Website, “selection of Aras as a partner enables I-Cubed to combine our experience in PLM-CAD integration and PLM data migration with Aras’s advanced PLM, multi-CAD and 3D Visualization technologies.” Their skills could prove valuable in the Aras ecosystem, since Aras Innovator is generally either integrating with or replacing existing PDM systems.
There are other PLM mechanics out there, and future posts will highlight the other important firms who are just making things work. Follow Stan on Twitter at @smprezbo.
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