I’m attending PTC Live 2011 event these days in HOT Las Vegas. Actually, you have no chance to feel Las Vegas weather when you are on the conference. Hotels and huge casinos environment are hiding windows, sunshine and the feeling of time. I’ve been doing live tweeting during the day, so if you want to feel a live pulse of PTC event, you can follow my tweets and Planet PTC tweet stream on PlanetPTC11. In addition to that, I’ve been sharing my photo stream via tweeter. You can get the access to this photo stream by navigating to the following link.
What is on the table?
PTC rocked the event with 3 major announcements – Creo 1.0 general availability, MKS acquisition and Windchill 10.0. Each of these events are significant enough. Creo 1.0 is long awaited and pre-announced before during PTC Lightning Event last year. MKS is a huge step towards the ability to manage a software development process. Windchill is “the biggest in the history” Windchill release. Now, some more details and thoughts.
Creo 1.0
Long anticipated release of Creo 1.0 was announced. Subset of Creo Apps became available today. Here is the list of Creo 1.0 apps and few screenshots I made during the presentation. I recommend you to take a deeper review about Creo 1.0 Apps by navigating on SolidSmack blog.
Creo Parametric – For “history-based” modeling with direct and free-form modeling capability.
Creo Direct – For “history-free” direct modeling to interact directly with the 3D geometry.
Creo Simulate – A simulation app for thermal and finite element analysis.
Creo Illustrate – An technical illustration app for communicating model info graphically in 3D.
Creo Schematics – An app for creating 2D routed systems diagrams, like cabling and piping.
Creo View MCAD – An app to view, interrogate, and mark up MCAD geometry.
Creo View ECAD – An app to viewer tailored for electronics.
Creo Sketch – An app to capture design ideas in 2D. (available July 2011)
Creo Layout – An app for early concept layout work in 2D, used for 3D. (available Nov 2011)
PTC is laying down few interesting concepts together with Creo 1.0. One of the most significant is Creo Common Data model. I had a conversation with Mike Campbell about Creo Apps and some aspects of Creo 1.0 architecture. Common Data Model (don’t be confused with anything related to databases) is about common infrastructure to handle CAD models and interoperability between Creo Apps. According to Mike, PTC is planning to release Creo common data model later in next coming releases to allow 3rd party developers to access Creo Apps data and making some manipulation.
Windchill 10.0
The original date of Windchill release was about 10 months ago. However, PTC was talking a lot about the significance of this event including significant (~$100M) R&D investment, lots of code re-writing and completely re-designed user experience. PTC surprised me by saying that they had a chance to discuss and review Windchill UI with some authorities in the world of UX (User Experience) – Steve Krug. Take a look on the following few pictures showing the Windchill UI compliance with Windows User Interface concepts.
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I will try to provide more examples and links to high-resolution pictures later on.
Mobile, Cloud and more…
PTC lands few surprises in this space of mobile and joined the race of PLM iOS mobile application announcements. Two mobile apps were presented today – Windchill and Arbotext mobile apps. By doing this PTC completely disconnects from Windows Application stack and movement to the future Win8, iOS and Android devices. In addition to that, PTC made minor announcement about availability of Windchill on the cloud platform – Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.
The Atmosphere
If you like Las Vegas, you can find the environment of the event very enjoyable. Caesars Palace is one of the biggest hotels can entertain you 24x7x365 days for the rest of your life (or until your pockets will be completely empty. I’m not a big fun of gambling, so can say nothing about that experience.
What is my conclusion? PTC made rock solid show today. The team shows integrity and was well orchestrated. I was impressed by a keynote and demo provided by Brian Shepherd. It was clean and except of some problems with PTC Social Links was running smoothly. Some of live demo were very impressive. PTC execs were achievable and schedule was flexible. High speed internet can be a big plus and can improve the quality and streamlining of the information. I’m going to blog later today and tomorrow and share my thoughts about PTC strategy. Especially interesting for me was everything related to the Windchill 10 and associated presentation of “single point of truth”.
Best, Oleg
