PTC/User World conference unveils future of product development

30 Jun 2006 00:00 IST

New Update

In one of the biggest gathering of about 2,000 participants, the PTC/User
Board at the 17th annual conference for PTC professionals got an elaborative
insight in to what PTC is up to for the coming years. Key officials from PTC
gave customers and media a preview to the roadmap updates including recent
merger and acquisition integration efforts as well as financial performance and
goals.

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Richard Harrison, President and CEO, PTC	Jim Heppelmann, Executive VP & Chief Product Officer, PTC

According to Richard Harrison, President and CEO, PTC, the company with all
the planned intiatives is targeting revenues of $1 billion by 2008, provided the
company grows at a rate of 12 to 15 percent in the next two years, which it did
in the last year.

Among its key initiatives, the company officials talked about integrating and
interlinking all its products, so that customer has the ease of using completely
integrated products without having to do most of the manual work. Justifying the
integration initiative, Harrison said, “The integration helps customers in
getting more piece of software from few vendors.” The integration of PTC's
Pro/Engineer and Mathcad was one of the major efforts that were announced during
the event. “Acquisition of Mathcad has brought the predictive engineering part
in to Pro/E,” said Jim Heppelmann, Executive VP and Chief Product Officer, PTC.
He also informed users that the new version of Pro/E Wildfire 3.0 M30 will be
out in August.

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This was the first event for the users of the newly acquired company
Arbortext, which focuses on generating rich interactive content for technical
publications. Brian Shepherd, Division VP-Product Management, PTC, touched on
the many new things that will be added onto the various product offering in the
coming years.

PTC eyes Indian customer
base

The transition of the CAD
(computer aided design) usage from 2D to 3D is really hot in India, and we
will surely want to make the most of it,” said Richard Harrison,
President and CEO, PTC, in an exclusive interview with CyberMedia during
the PTC/User World conference held in Dallas recently.

“India is a fast developing market and
we do realize the importance of our presence in this market,” said
Harrision.

According to him, Indian operation is
more of a back office for all the product development services that they
offer. About 25 percent of PTC's revenue comes from services. “I am
hopeful of India becoming a good customer base for all our product with
all the fast paced development that is happening in India,” he opined.

PTC India also contributed in a
significant way to the development activities of the PTC's products
enhancements. PTC has about 1,200 personnel employed only on the research
and development part of the company. A part of it is in India.

The company is closely watching some of
the new development in the field of manufacturing and is poised to making
appropriate investment in the future, he said.

Currently, most of PTCs business comes
from the automotive and engineering business in the country and these are
mostly handled directly by the company. According to Harrison, PTC will
strive to get more of channel partner involvement in doing business in a
vast country like India. “The worldwide business through channel has
been only around 20 percent of the revenue. We want to increase this to at
least 25 percent in the next one year. We are hoping to do the same in
India also,” he added.

He also offered to make India a part of
the initiatives of PTC targeted at educational institutes. About three
million copies of Pro/Engineer were distributed as student version for the
young generation to get acquainted with 3D CAD and CAE across the world.

According to him, coming years will see a tight integration of Pro/E,
Windchill and Arbortext. “This will make the applications easy to use,
understand and optimize their works,” added Shepherd. Apart from the
integration, the Shepherd also revealed PTC's plans to introduce many new
features to the Pro/E wildfire, such as auto-round features (which no other CAD
software provides to date), rich search and visualizations, collaboration of
ECAD and MCAD, shrink wraps features (removing IP and reducing the size up to 97
percent), and finally options to integrate ERP by giving a Enterprise System
Interface.

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The three-day conference was attended by customers from China, Italy, Japan,
Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and US.

(The author was hosted by PTC)

NELSON JOHNYDALLAS, TEXAS