Thursday, July 24, 2008

PTC Bloodhounds Catch a French Scent

This week's quarterly conference call with PTC was enlightening, to say the least. But then, there's never a dull moment during a PTC conference call. 

First they surprised everybody with results that beat both their own estimates and the Wall Street consensus. They are now on schedule to easily surpass $1 billion in annual sales for the fiscal year that ends September 30, 2008.


CEO Dick Harrison contemplates a $1 billion year of sales.  

But the fun part came when a friendly Wall Street analyst lobbed them an easy pitch, asking about the competitive landscape and specifically about Dassault Systemes. If you want the verbatim transcript you'll have to read my CADCAMNet article tonight. Interpreted for the 3DCN audience (that's you, dear reader), the discussion was more or less like this: 


Wall Street Analysts and PTC Executives Gather to Chat about Revenue and the Competition

Needham Analyst (Puts feet up on cracker barrel and takes another sip from the jug): It looks Frenchy's gonna hide his V6 CAD moonshine so nobody can use it but what buys his MatrixOne cabinet thingy. That means CATIA hooch will be locked tight as a schoolmarm's blouse. What y'all goin' do 'bout it? 

PTC's James Heppelmann (Pauses to slap the underage Neil Moses for taking a nip of Old Windchill, then replies): Them Parisian CAD boys think they're just hot $#!+,  don't they! But I'm tellin' ya, hidin' their CATIA v6 hootch inside that MatrixOne contraption is just plain horse hooey. We don't think moonshine customers will put up for it, no sir! We put our CAD moonshine in a data management box five years ago, there's nothing fancy or new about that. But when we did it, we did it right out in the open where our customers could pick and choose. Why some of our customers even bought their CAD moonshine cabinets from them fellas what keep changing their name every time they score. We're OK with that. But this lockin' up the CAD data stuff, that's just wrong! Dicky boy, tell em our secret plan.

PTC's Richard Harrison (Stands, adjusts his suspenders, wipes the moonshine from his mouth and the sweat from his brow in a single motion with an old flannel handkerchief): It's simple boys. We gonna call out the bloodhounds. We already got 450 sales bloodhounds out there, and were gonna buy a bunch more. And every one of those bloodhounds have caught Frenchy's scent! They're on the trail. We gonna have some French Roast pretty soon, if you catch my drift.

 

New PTC Sales Representatives at their first day of training. 

 

 

Posted by Randall at 10:34:05 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |