Remember my post few weeks ago about PLM highway? Boston is certainly a place where you can see a concentration of major CAD / PLM companies. As part of my blogging activity, I’m leveraging the advantage of living in a close proximity to these companies. It gives me an opportunity to visit offices of these companies and have less formal conversation with people there.
PTC office is actually the closest office to my place. Literally, it is 10 min drive. I had a chance to spend my morning today at PTC talking about different product topics – Social Link, anyBOM, Mobile Apps and some others.
Windchill Social Link
I’ve got a deep dive in Social Link from David Blair, VP of Social Product Development. I have already seen few presentations of this product so for me, it was a good opportunity to ask more questions and discuss various aspects of PTC social product development strategy. If you have never seen Social Link, navigate to the following link to see some basic presentations and videos. Social Link is about communities. There are three types of community supported – practices, product and innovation. You may ask what is the difference? Here is the deal – social link is connected to various PTC application events. Each type of community provides a specific configuration of events. Obviously, you can re-configure all events. The underline technological platform of Social Link is Microsoft SharePoint.
PTC and Mobile
Mobile is clearly trending. 1-2 years ago, the main question people asked about mobile was “do we need it?”. Today, most of the people are asking two questions – 1/when? 2/what platform to support first? So, PTC is coming with more mobile applications. Soon, we are going to see Windchill Mobile, Arbotext Mobile on iPad and maybe few more experimental apps.
anyBOM Assembly
To switch gears from technology, social and mobile, I have an interesting conversation with Brian Thompson about coming release of Creo Option Modeler in coming Creo release. In a nutshell, anyBOM technology supposed to provide a support for top down design of highly configured products with the ability to define configuration rules based on the information coming from business aspects of product development. I cannot share all details of this conversation before Creo 2.0 release. If you haven’t chance to see anyBOM presentation last year during PTC Creo Launch.
3D Demo Theatre
I spent some time in PTC 3D presentation theater. One of my points of interest was to explore what PTC did with regards to Windchill usability in their last release. (Windchill 10). In addition to having Windchill 10 on an enormously huge cinema screen, I had a chance to play with 3D simulation software. Look on few pictures below.
What is my conclusion? You are probably familiar with statements “beavers do what beavers do”. Don’t expect beavers to build PLM. Beavers build dams. So, PTC is a “beaver type” company. PTC builds Product Lifecycle Software. Don’t expect them to build something else. They will talk to you about CAD, BOM, Parts, Assemblies, Configurations. The biggest question – will PTC shake the industry with Creo – is still not answered, in my view. They are clearly moving towards that goals. However, the speed is important. Just my opinion…
Best, Oleg
Freebie. PTC didn’t pay me to write this post. I enjoyed PTC coffee, and some PTC branded marketing stuff.
