So, it finally happened. After almost 6 months of official preparation, PTC launched a new product line – CREO. CREO will replace existing Pro-E, CoCreate and ProductView products. I had a chance to attend this event today in Boston and made few pictures. Take a look on the next picture. In my view, it gives you the most non-marketing view of what PTC presented:
For the beginning, I’d like to mention the following 3 topics that come to my mind in the context of PTC Creo: Applification, Common Data Model, Interoperability. Let me dig inside of each of these topics.
Applification
It seems to me PTC folks finally got the world of applications and App stores. Like Apple split 10 song CD into 10 songs and start selling them by pieces, PTC is planning to deliver CAD and PLM applications using the same concept. It will be hard to understand and to map what will belong to CAD and PLM. However, the strategy for app split and granularity seem to me logical. It will be interesting to see how to sell this strategy to engineering software folks.
Common Data Model
CDM is an element of PTC Creo architecture that supposed to provide the unification of functions and serve as a root for integration. You can find such an element almost in every enterprise solution. Common Data Model is a feature in Creo I want to understand better. Having hundreds of applications dependent on such a complicated element of infrastructure can make the overall solution less robust. However, I will dig into this later.
Interoperability
The notion of interoperability was in the air when PTC talked about multiple apps communicating with each other. Interoperability is the old and well known topics. PTC is trying to leapfrog and close an interoperability gap. How it will happen? I’m not sure understood it. The Creo box allowing to get any CAD model into Creo. However, nothing was said about how possible to get this information out back to the original CAD system.
What is my conclusion today? I think, PTC demonstrated a very good understanding of market and customer. They are presenting a plan to deliver solutions answering a set of well known problems. To identify problems right is already more than 50% in the delivery process. Let see how many PTC Creo Apps we’ll see in the future…
Best, Oleg
