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Parametric Technology Corp. - CAD
Software Category Directory
(781)
370-5000
140
Kendrick Street
Needham, MA 02494
www.ptc.com
Sales
$672
million
Business Description
AParametric Technology Corporation (PTC), founded in 1985 and headquartered
in Needham, MA, develops, markets and supports product lifecycle management
(PLM) software solutions and related services that help manufacturers
improve the competitiveness of their products and product development
processes. Our solutions, which include a suite of mechanical computer-aided
design tools (our design solutions) and a range of web-based collaboration
technologies (our collaboration and control solutions), enable manufacturing
companies to create virtual computer-based products (digital products),
collaborate on designs within the enterprise and throughout the extended
supply chain, and control the digital product information throughout the
product lifecycle. This results in streamlined engineering processes,
improved product quality, optimized product information management and
reduced cost and time-to-market cycles. Our PLM software solutions are
complemented by our experienced services and technical support
organizations, as well as resellers, systems integrators, and other
strategic partners, who provide training, consulting, ancillary product
offerings, implementation and support to customers worldwide.
Historically, our core business focus has been to provide design solutions
to customers through our flagship Pro/ENGINEER® design software, and we
continue to provide our customers with industry-leading product development,
manufacturing and engineering design solutions based on this software.
License and services revenue associated with our design solutions continues
to comprise a majority of our revenue. While the discrete market for
computer-aided design solutions has declined, we believe that there is
opportunity for growth in the adjacent collaboration and control solutions
market and we have seen these two markets converge into a broader PLM
opportunity. The PLM market encompasses the mechanical computer-aided
design, manufacturing and engineering (CAD, CAM and CAE) markets as well as
many previously isolated markets that address various phases of the product
lifecycle. These include product data management (PDM), component and
supplier management, visualization and digital mockup, enterprise
application integration, program and project management, after market
service and portfolio management, requirements management, customer needs
management, and manufacturing planning.
With our suite of PLM software solutions, we see an opportunity to address
several of the key challenges that manufacturing companies face in their
product development processes: more frequent change, heterogeneity of
systems, and increased communication inside and outside the manufacturing
enterprise to support growing outsourcing and increasingly transparent
supply chains. Accordingly, we have channeled significant resources into our
collaboration and control solutions and their integration with our design
software. With our PLM software suite, we can provide our customers a
product development system that permits individuals—regardless of their
roles in the commercialization of a product, the computer-based tools they
use, or their location geographically or in the supply chain—to participate
in and impact the product development process across the digital product
value chain. We believe that as we continue to implement our strategy for
our products to become more tightly integrated and easier to deploy, we can
create significant added value for our existing customer base.
All of our software solutions continue to be distributed primarily through
our direct sales force. In tandem with our direct sales force, we utilize an
indirect distribution channel. Our indirect distribution channel has been
broadened over the last three years through resellers, alliances with
third-party systems integrators and other strategic partners. The resellers
provide greater geographic and small-account coverage, primarily for our
design solutions. Systems integrator partners work with our direct sales
force to locate and target potential PLM opportunities.
Products and Services
Our design solutions and our collaboration and control solutions are aligned
under a unified product strategy. The strategy allows us to capitalize on
existing product synergies and offer fully leveraged product development
solutions that enable the creation, collaboration and control of digital
product information across the extended design chain. Our efforts have
resulted in the creation of a new offering, the product development system,
which is comprised of a suite of integrated products and services offerings.
The goal of our product development system approach is to reduce complexity
for our customers by ensuring that our solutions, which support core product
development processes, work together in a cohesive system.
Our product development system delivers a comprehensive footprint that
offers the capabilities necessary to improve our customers’ product
development processes. These processes involve the entire enterprise and are
further extended to include supplier, partner, and customer participants.
Our product development system provides three essential capabilities to
improve product development processes:
• Create product designs (resulting in high fidelity digital products),
• Collaborate cross-functionally in an organization and throughout the
digital product value chain, and
• Control and manage product information and product development processes
throughout a product’s lifecycle.
Our footprint of capabilities aligns on a sensible system architecture,
which is built from the ground up to address the needs of the digital
product value chain. Our product development system architecture is:
• Integral—sharing a common database schema, common business objects, and a
common web-based user interface,
• Internet—in that it deploys seamlessly across existing Intranet and
Internet infrastructures to accommodate a distributed value chain, and
• Interoperable—integrating easily with other systems using standard
protocols and integration approaches.
DESIGN SOLUTIONS
Our family of engineering design software encompasses a broad spectrum of
engineering disciplines essential to the development of virtually all
manufactured products, ranging from consumer products to jet aircraft.
Manufacturers compete on the basis of cost, time to market and product
performance criteria, which are significantly affected by the quality and
length of the product development process. Our software tools offer
high-performance product design solutions for the creation of digital
products that improve product quality and reduce time to market by enabling
end-users easily to evaluate multiple design alternatives and to share data
with bi-directional associativity.
The cornerstone of our design solutions software is Pro/ENGINEER®, a
mechanical design automation technology based on a robust, parametric,
feature-based solid modeler, enabling changes made during the design process
to be associatively updated throughout the design. Pro/ENGINEER is
complemented by functional options and extensions as well as other products
for conceptual design, simulation, routed systems design, and manufacturing
production. These features allow companies to create more innovative,
differentiated and functional products quickly and easily.
In February 2003, we commenced shipment of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire™, the most
recent release of our Pro/ENGINEER design solution. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire is
designed to offer design engineers enhanced ease-of-use and the ability to
integrate design tools with our collaboration and control solutions. The
product’s new user interface makes it more competitive with lower end
modeling tools on the market that are known for ease-of-use, while
maintaining the powerful functionality of Pro/ENGINEER. Additionally,
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire is the first CAD system with an embedded web browser
and native support for web services. The combination of Pro/ENGINEER and
Windchill® on an integral, internet-based, interoperable architecture
enables us to offer customers a product development system that supports a
multi-user, distributed environment and complex product development
processes. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire also offers optional peer-to-peer design
conferencing from within the application, enabling enhanced real-time
collaboration with a distributed design team. Additional offerings within
the Pro/ENGINEER family include:
Pro/ENGINEER Concept: Pro/CONCEPT™ is the industry’s first all-in-one CAD
tool for digital mixed media idea exploration. By itself or paired with
Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/CONCEPT is a break-through product for rapid concept
generation.
Pro/ENGINEER Simulation: Pro/ENGINEER Simulation software allows engineers
to test and thereby optimize designs for structural, dynamic, thermal, and
durability performance. These solutions provide benefits by minimizing
physical prototyping, increasing engineering creativity, and helping deliver
higher quality products in less time.
Pro/ENGINEER Routed Systems: Pro/ENGINEER Routed Systems software offers
comprehensive and associative capabilities for electrical, cabling, and
piping design and manufacturing. Designers, packaging engineers, and
manufacturing engineers quickly and accurately can design, route, document,
and produce complex harness and piping systems. A tight integration between
this world-class 2D schematic tool and the 3D assembly capabilities of
Pro/ENGINEER enables extensive information exchange and product validation.
Pro/ENGINEER Production: Pro/ENGINEER Production software enables designers
to create downstream deliverables such as molds and progressive dies,
Numerical Control (NC) tool paths, and inspection programs. By directly
referencing Pro/ENGINEER designs, production and tooling engineers can
handle tooling design and detailing, NC process planning, NC programming,
and inspection/verification, automatically responding to changes to the
design with no data translation obstacles.
Pro/INTRALINK®: Pro/INTRALINK is a mature and widely deployed Pro/ENGINEER
workgroup data management solution. Pro/INTRALINK manages the relationships
between Pro/ENGINEER deliverables from concept to design and manufacturing.
It simplifies Pro/ENGINEER data management activities that are necessary for
product development by transparently incorporating them into the design
process.
COLLABORATION AND CONTROL SOLUTIONS
Our collaboration and control solutions have evolved to address expanding
customer needs since their introduction in 1998. The cornerstone of our
collaboration and control solutions is our suite of Windchill® based
products. Windchill is currently sold in two forms based on the common
Windchill infrastructure: our Windchill Link solutions and configurable
Windchill Modules for enterprise-level PLM.
Our Windchill Link solutions consist of pre-configured, integrated products
that utilize the web-based Windchill architecture, as well as components of
our design solutions and our Windchill enterprise-level application modules.
These point solutions are designed to address specific business-critical
manufacturing functions and can be implemented with little configuration in
as few as several weeks in accordance with a predefined implementation
methodology. These solutions include:
Windchill PDMLink™: a product data management solution that helps
manufacturers control information by ensuring data accessibility and
managing the product development process throughout the life of a product.
Windchill ProjectLink™: a project management solution that enables
employees, partners, suppliers, and customers to collaborate on projects
through web-based workspaces, project plan development, milestone tracking,
activity assignment and management, and discussion forums.
Windchill DynamicDesignLink™: a collaborative application engineering
solution that helps manufacturers address the increasing demand for
design-to-order products through visually interactive, dynamic,
collaborative capabilities including graphical product family modeling,
product family catalog publication, product configuration, and automated
generation of digital product deliverables.
Windchill PartsLink™: an interactive product catalog solution that enables
designers to achieve maximum part reuse through web-based access to
standard, preferred part suppliers, and allows suppliers of standard parts
to provide their customers with rich technical product data.
We also offer Windchill capabilities in a modular form to support
customer-specific configurations that address unique needs within customers’
complex PLM processes. The Windchill Modules architecture and toolsets
enable manufacturers to extend the data models and user interface to support
unique business processes, such as legacy system replacement and
consolidation, complex workflow and document management, and integration and
rationalization of diverse systems following merger or acquisition. Unlike
other product information management applications based on proprietary
architectures and toolsets that discourage tailored configurations, the
Windchill Modules architecture and toolsets explicitly enable manufacturers
to extend the data models, functionality, and user interface as they see
fit. The Windchill Modules consist principally of the following: a vault for
data management to store and retrieve product files; workflow applications
for sequencing the flow of product information and change management
processes; visualization software for enabling the customer to see a
three-dimensional view of product data; and, when desired, data adaptors for
connecting to standard computer aided design (CAD) software or standard
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems via standard application
interfaces.
The Windchill Modules include:
Windchill Foundation for core PLM infrastructure;
Windchill PDM for product data management;
Windchill ProductView for visualization; and
Windchill Information Modeler to accelerate the configuration process, as
well as integrations to CAD, engineering, and other enterprise systems and
applications.
The Windchill Modules have standard features and functions with capabilities
that include product and process management, collaboration, and product
planning. The pre-defined templates (e.g., document folders and workflows)
may be used as is or may be configured to the customer’s business
environment. For example, the workflow template may be changed to reflect
the customer’s organizational approval preferences.
Because all Windchill-based products are built on the same core technology,
our customers are able to combine configured Windchill Modules with the
Windchill Link solutions. As a result of this flexibility, our customers are
not forced to make tradeoffs between competitive differentiation and
operational efficiency—both can be realized with Windchill, maximizing
competitive advantage.
With the launch of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, we began selling a product
development system package called “Flex 3C” for Create, Collaborate and
Control. This package is configured to meet the needs of the high-end design
engineer working in a process-oriented environment. It includes both
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire design solutions with advanced engineering modules,
and Windchill Link collaboration and control solutions, including Windchill
ProjectLink and Windchill PDMLink as a data management option.
These design and collaboration and control solutions are part of our overall
strategy to provide a portfolio of PLM solutions that address specific
business challenges that occur at various points in the product lifecycle.
They are designed to enable manufacturers to implement a product development
system appropriate for their particular requirements, allowing them to
deliver new products to market faster and manage the complexities of product
development throughout an evolving supply chain.
SERVICES
Maintenance Services
We offer maintenance support plans for our software products. Customers who
participate in our maintenance support plans receive periodic software
updates and new releases. Active maintenance plan customers also have direct
access to our global technical support team of certified engineers and thus
benefit from the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of this ISO 9001
accredited organization, resulting in timely and accurate issue resolution.
Moreover, we provide self-service support tools that allow our customers
access at all times to an extensive amount of information quickly and
dynamically. This combination of new product releases, technical support,
and self-service tools further extends our ability to address our customers
evolving requirements.
Other Services
Our software solutions and maintenance support offerings are complemented by
additional service offerings from our services organization, as well as from
third-party resellers, systems integrators and other strategic partners. We
designed our portfolio of services offerings to leverage our product and
process expertise and create value for customers. We offer a comprehensive
portfolio of services to facilitate the adoption of our technology into an
optmized product development environment, ensuring alignment of business
processes with strategy, conditioning the organization to follow new rules
and procedures, deployment of the “right” technology that supports
organizational and strategic goals, and driving technology adoption through
traning programs. Our services organization focuses on:
Implementation Services: We offer a range of technology installation,
configuration, and migration services, from pre-packaged “quick start”
deployments to full system integration.
Process and Technology Adoption Services: Our consulting services enable
widespread acceptance and utilization of our solutions, addressing
organizational challenges and competing priorities. Our proven methodology
helps condition an organization to adopt new processes and enable target
users successfully to utilize the applications for measurable productivity
gains.
Education Services: We offer an extensive role-based curriculum to
accelerate adoption of the product development system and realize value
across the entire enterprise. Our education services also assist our
customers’ users to overcome resistance to change and reluctance to use new
tools.
Competition
There
are a number of companies offering solutions that address specific
functional areas covered by our PLM solutions such as: Dassault Systemes and
Electronic Data Systems (EDS) for traditional design solutions, PDM
solutions and visualization and digital mock-up solutions; MatrixOne for PDM
solutions; Agile Software Corp., for bill of materials management; and i2
Technologies Inc. for part sourcing solutions. In addition, larger,
better-known enterprise-solution companies with established customers may
enter the PLM market and offer solutions deeply integrated with their other
enterprise software applications. For example, SAP has begun to offer a
“PLM” solution that controls product data within the larger framework of its
ERP solution. We believe that our
Ticker
PMTC
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