3D CAD NEWS

CADCAMNet has learned that former Mathsoft CEO Chris Randles will be named tomorrow as the new CEO of SpaceClaim. He fills a vacancy left when co-founder and initial CEO Mike Payne was moved to a sole role as chairman of the board of directors.

Randles is currently entrepreneur-in-residence as Borealis Ventures, one of the three venture capital firms backing SpaceClaim. He started with Mathsoft in 2001 as vp of marketing, and later rose to become CEO, the position he held when the company was acquired by PTC in 2006.

CADCAMNet will feature an interview with Randles on Thursday.

Randles was raised in England, but has lived in the US for over 16 years and has dual UK and US citizenship. He holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and has also completed executive programs at London Business School and Caltech.

Serial CAD entrepreneur Mike Payne may have been asked to vacate the CEO chair at SpaceClaim, (he’s now “just” chairman of the board) but he certainly hasn’t been put in a box. The Boston Globe sought him out to discuss the possible sale of PTC, and he responds with an interesting mini-history of the innovation curve in technology.

Payne’s interviewer is Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner, who was less kind to PTC in his written comments than Payne was in the interview.

PTC has hired investment banking firm Goldman Sachs to seek potential buyers for the company. The stock closed today up 9% to 20.78, near its 52-week high of 21.54. The news was first reported today by the Financial Times, but then picked up by other business publications.

The higher stock price drives PTC market capitalization past the $2 billion mark. Published reports today suggest the asking price is $2 billion, but stockholders will likely want a premium above recent trading level.

PTC is coming off the second-best quarter in company history, and recently announced a blockbuster multi-year deal with EADS, the parent company of Airbus, that will over time become its largest single sale. The sale came after a long and rigorous benchmarking process that pitted PTC’s Windchill PLM software against rival products from Siemens PLM and Dassault Systemes. For details on EADS’ benchmark process, see the CADCAMNet article, “EADS Raises the Bar for PLM Benchmarking.”

In recent years PTC has been following a growth by acquisition strategy, picking up smaller technology firms with complimentary products, including Arbortext for product documentation, ITEDO for technical illustration, and CoCreate for its alternative 3D CAD software which uses an explicit approach as opposed to PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER, which pioneered parametric 3D modeling.

More details Thursday in CADCAMNet.