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 PDF June 12, 2011, PTC opened their US end user event, PlanetPTC Live 2011, at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in front of over two thousand attendees and announced that a “new era of product design” had begun with the release of their Creo 1.0 applications. Marketing bravado aside, PTC has aggressively re-emerged into the product design and development arena. Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice-President of Product Development, detailed Creo 1.0, the major release of Windchill 10.0, and the acquisition of MKS, a leading supplier of solutions for managing embedded software development. All combine to draw renewed attention to PTC’s position in the broad PLM industry. Real immediate impact is felt, however, with the delivery of Creo. Over the past twenty-five years, PTC fundamentally changed the MCAD industry when they introduced parametric solid modeling in their flagship product, Pro/ENGINEER. Now, PTC hopes to re-energize their fortunes with a combination of both parametric

 PDF Companies are always on a quest to find and employ best-in-class solutions to help them improve their product design process. This is particularly true in the area of simulation and analysis (S&A) for which hundreds of computer-based analysis codes are available. One vendor can’t possibly satisfy all of the specialized needs of companies in this critical area of product development since the range of solutions crosses a number of highly technical domains such as finite element analysis and computational fluid dynamics. Altair Engineering, based in Troy, Michigan, has created an innovative program that allows it to provide its customers with access to a portfolio of solutions from other sources that augment its own product offerings. CIMdata believes that this program, called the HyperWorks Partner Alliance (HWPA), offers substantial benefits to engineers and analysts as well as the S&A vendor community. Altair’s well-regarded suite of S&A and related solutions, called HyperWorks includes

On 27 April 2011, Dassault Systèmes (DS) significantly upgraded their formulation, recipe, and specification management offering by acquiring Enginuity, a Connecticut-based software company. While no terms of the agreement were announced, the DS earnings call presentation suggests they spent no more than 30 million Euros for the acquisition. In business since 1992, the privately-held Enginuity focuses on PLM solutions for the CPG, personal care, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and specialty chemicals industries. They support implementations in 26 countries, from 30 to more than 800 users. Enginuity has a strong customer list, including P&G, Revlon, Pfizer, Merck, Schering-Plough, AkzoNobel, and Clairol. According to Enginuity, their solution runs on multiple backend data management solutions. Their strong use of XML should make the move to ENOVIA straightforward. DS will continue to offer ENOVIA Specification Central to support some customer use cases. Specification Central is the specification management capability started at MatrixOne that has continued to evolve.

 PDF In recent years, manufacturers across all industries have had to contend with an expanding list of increasingly stringent and complex regulations governing issues such as health, safety, recyclability, and materials traceability. Complying with these regulations is now a fact of life in most industries, where the new business mantra is “comply or die.” Tough New Green Regulations & Requirements For years, regulatory compliance applied mostly to pharmaceutical, food and beverage, medical devices, and aerospace companies—industries with governmental regulations requiring them to be able to identify the precise components or sources of materials/ingredients (e.g., in the case of an identified problem such as pharmaceutical side effects in patients, food recall, or accident). Considerable focus is now being made on environmental regulations and sustainability (or “greenness”) issues for companies around the world that are “going green.” Some of the toughest such regulations are in the European Union (EU), including the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS)

 PDF Benjamin Franklin, the well-known 18th Century publisher of Poor Richard’s Almanack and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, is credited for stating, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes.” Well, we’re not sure that there are only two things that are certain in life. We think many would argue that there are a few others, such as our need for food and our basic instincts for seeking out health and safety. So you might ask, what does this have to do with product lifecycle management (PLM)? Well, actually quite a bit. At its core, PLM is about defining and bringing to market products people need and want to buy. Today’s best-in-class PLM solutions are, in fact, a combination of best practice methodologies and supporting technologies with the sole purpose of defining and bringing to market products with a higher rate of acceptance by

Over the last several months, we have been asked by several players in the PLM economy about “seat counts” for various PLM solutions. This information is generally not published and is almost always confusing. The definition of a “seat” has as many variations as the ones creating the estimate or asking the question. So, just what is a seat? Airplane seat (many of us in the PLM economy see too many of those, don’t we?), car seat (my time with those is up, at least for while), and I hope to see the two seats on the right in my down time. And, I also do not mean a SEAT. Almost all of the solution providers in the PLM space apportion at least some of their portfolio by the seat. Over the last couple years, PTC has changed the way they report their numbers, and in their prepared remarks they provide great

Analysts are often known for creating new words or concepts to describe the world. When it first came out that I was returning to an analyst role at CIMdata, I coined a word that I put on my Twitter feed: Oblogation -noun 1. a blog that a person is bound or obliged to create when they become an “analyst.” It took a while to get this blog started, but here goes. The creativity of analysts extends to creating models. (In a future post, I will include my obligatory 2×2 matrix.) Any analyst worth his or her salt will have a model or two in their pocket. Maybe that is one reason I enjoy this profession, as I firmly believe in using models. No, not that type of model (at least not in this space). Models in the sense of what does not appear until the tenth definition of the word “model” at dictionary.com: 10.

 PDF Engineers generally think of the suppliers of engineering analysis or CAE (also known as simulation and analysis) solutions as engineering software tools developers and marketers. Based on CIMdata’s many years of experience working with CAE suppliers and users, we recognize that this is not the case with Altair Engineering (www.altair.com) headquartered in Troy, Michigan. Founded in 1985, Altair is privately held and has offices throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia/Pacific. Since its early years, the company has been an important provider of products and services in the areas of product design, advanced engineering software, grid computing technologies and enterprise analytics solutions. The company began life as an engineering services provider, a business it continues to maintain, and introduced its first commercial CAE product, HyperMesh, in 1990. Its 1,300 plus employees deliver these solutions to companies in many industries including automotive, aerospace, government and defense, heavy equipment, consumer products, life

 PDF Continuous pressures to improve productivity, lower costs, compress delivery times, and enhance product quality are challenging manufacturers around the world. At the same time, the quest for innovation of both products and internal processes is essential for companies to be successful. In this environment, companies are investing in numerous initiatives that promise to address these challenges. One of the key factors in delivering right-to-market products in the shortest possible time is improving how companies analyze, simulate, and test new designs and create physical products to validate that the design (i.e., the virtual product) meets the functional requirements and all applicable standards. Historically, this was accomplished using a combination of various stand-alone analysis tools and the construction of physical prototypes to test. Such processes typically added significant time and cost to the overall development process. Additionally, if the analysis and simulation of the virtual model were not considered to accurately reflect the

 PDF Like any expanding and highly competitive software market, the PLM market is not immune to the technology refresh debate—a debate that marketing professionals love to use to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and technologists use to create elaborate justification matrices. If you remove all the hype and marketing adjectives you usually find that those technology-based solutions that sustain a positive revenue growth trajectory over at least a ten-year period usually are staying with the technological times. Those that appear to be a “flash in the pan” generally chose to go down a technological dead-end or did not invest enough to keep up with the rest of the pack. Over the years, numerous new technologies have been touted as the latest, greatest things to happen to the world of software development. Many of those, have eventually fallen by the wayside, but some significant developments have survived. During the mid to late 1990s,