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.

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. 

[Editor's Note: Our usual policy of providing the visuals is being pre-empted so you can obey the headline.]

 

Events of recent weeks have shaken the status quo in the CAD/PLM business. In no particular order:

 

1. Dassault Systemes unveiled “PLM 2.0″ which can be summarized as “visualize whirled parts.”

 

2. Autodesk bought Moldflow, which can be summarized as “visualize plastic parts.”  

 

3. PTC released a new version of CoCreate, which can be summarized as “visualize our hand in your pocket. Please.”

 

4. SpaceClaim is still in business, which can be summarized as “visualize working for a buyout.”  

 

5. Siemens PLM Software “launched” (which in PR language is an intermediary step between “announced” and “shipped”) new versions of NX and Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology. This can be summarized as “visualize us with hot new technology and an 18-month lead on our competitors.”

 

6. Siemens PLM also announced the delivery of Teamcenter licence number 4 million. This can be visualized as a mountain when compared to the total sales of “pure” PLM seats (PDM on steroids) from all competitors combined.

 

 

The ignoble Pushmi-Pullyu (“push-me pull-you”) is a two-headed beast made famous by the Doctor Doolittle stories of the 19^th Century. The mythical animal is noted for its ability to do either two things at once or struggle to do nothing, and to oscillate between these two extremes. Our 21^st Century CAD equivalent is history-free feature-based 3D modeling. For years a few vendors struggled to gain market share with it (CoCreate and Kubotek come to mind), but suddenly Pushmi-Pullyu CAD has become the rage.

SpaceClaim got way more press than it deserved for its new “natural 3D design system” last year, then PTC embraced its inner pushmi-pullyu by buying CoCreate. Today Siemens PLM Software becomes the latest CAD company to abandon the CAD Reich gospel of parameters uber alles with the introduction of what it calls synchronous technology (as if there is something mysteriously asynchronous about using existing 3D CAD tools; but we digress).

The Pushmi-Pullyu, new mascot of Siemens PLM Solutions

No less an authority on these things than Dr. Ken Versprille, the father of NURBS and resident PLM guru at CPDA, says in a published quote (I’ll bet a dollar he was paid to write), “its ability to recognize current geometry conditions and localize dependencies in real time allows synchronous technology to solve for model changes without the typical replay of the full construction history from the point of edit.”

Ken’s quote is a real mouthful, so let us translate for the SolidWorks bloggers among our readership: You don’t have to redraw the damn part to make a single damn change all the damn time anymore. The good doctor goes on to say that “… users will see dramatic performance gains. A 100 times speed improvement could be a conservative estimate.”

Wow! Models 100x faster than with Autodesk Inventor and probably 300x faster than CATIA? Siemens resellers must be doubled over with orgasmic spasms at the mere suggestion of such superior results, especially because this new technology will be added to both NX and Solid Edge. Maybe Solid Edge will actually sell some copies again.

When you get the previous word picture washed out of your mind, let us consider something a bit more serious. CAD pundits (self glamourously included as shown below) refer to the Big Four CAD Vendors: Autodesk, Dassault Systemes, Siemens PLM, and PTC. A year ago not one of these had history-free feature-based modeling; now two do. Not that long ago Autodesk and Dassault entered into a bidding war over Seemage; perhaps SpaceClaim just might survive long enough to be so lucky.

A self-proclaimed Leading CAD Pundit caught in the act of meditating on synchronous technology at COFES 2008.

I always enjoy the part of the annual PTC press/analyst conference when customers take the podium. They tell their story, give honest answers to pointed questions, and seem genuinely happy to be PTC customers. Of course, PTC wouldn’t bother to bring in grumpy customers, but that’s not my point. A new national study confirms what I see — customers really like PTC.

The CMO Council, an international organization of marketing executives, issued its annual ranking of customer affinity in the IT industry today. The report, “Customer Affinity Index of the Top 75 IT Brands Ranked by IT Buyer,” rates PTC in the top ten. It is the only CAD/PLM company on the list, and PTC outranks such IT leaders as IBM, Microsoft, Dell, and Oracle.

In the research study accompanying the ranking, the CMO Council suggests that customer affinity “surpasses brand awareness as the key predictor of purchasing decisions.” The Council says customers seek out companies that best align themselves with the customer’s priorities and needs.

The CMO Council conducted qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys of more than 1,500 key stakeholders in all major industries to analyze the interests of IT buyers. The customer affinity index assesses the strength of the customer/vendor relationship based on six key drivers:

• Market understanding and response to needs
• Product or service experience
• Brand perception and reputation
• Communications quality and frequency
• Accessibility and availability of support
• Corporate confidence, trust, and credibility

This blog finds it way too easy at times to have a bit of fun at PTC’s expense. It is a company that is willing to be “out there,” taking risks and showing a bit of edgyness and personality. It also has more direct competition than any other CAD/PLM company, since their product line scales from one user to 10,000. It is good to see any CAD company be honored by The CMO Council, and not really surprising that PTC is the one they chose.

It is hard for small third-party developers of CAD add-ins to get recognition in the market. Most suffice themselves to be listed in a CAD vendor’s directory; some get noticed by resellers or gain sales via word of mouth. To gain attention, they need to be clever and creative. Which may be the right adjectives to describe a new campaign from Etrage, which makes add-in applications for PTC products Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire and Windchill.

This week Etrage announced an IWBIWYBI contest. Pronounced “Eebbie-wibbie,” IWBIWYBI is short for “If We build It Will You Buy It?”The contest is a challenge to PTC users to suggest new ideas for third-party applications for Wildfire and Windchill. Applications can be in the areas of engineering automation, data integration, triggers or other Pro/TOOLKIT applications. Etrage will turn one or more of the ideas submitted into new products. Unless the development costs are huge, if your suggestion is selected you’ll get the resulting product for free.

Etrage’s Ron Zabilski says PTC users are a varied lot, and their need for custom features are diverse. “Examples range from triggers that activate programs based on conditions that exist in the part, assembly or drawing or control how these models are saved in the PDM system to automatically creating plots or viewable files to large scale engineering automations where companies look for optimizations of designs through automatic feature creation, automatic drawing creation and annotation, and downstream feeds to NC controlled manufacturing systems,” Zabilski told us via email in a sentence I doubt he would say in real life without taking a breath or two in the middle.

Some PTC shops are large enough to have in-house development teams who can create custom applications. The majority rely on third party developers like Etrage. “In many cases,” notes Zabilski, “the development of these types of projects are complex because they require software development skills in C and C++, as well as knowledge in the underlying CAD and PDM API’s.”

 

Every time I attend a PTC event or talk to someone from the company, I am amazed at the variety of snappy one-line put-downs about their competition. Several months ago a Wall Street analyst commented on it, noting that he loved being on the quarterly PTC conference call so he could hear all the “colorful color” PTC adds to its commentary. Lines like “There is no center in Teamcenter” roll of the tongue of a PTC employee like Bible verses roll of the tongue of a Sunday School scholar.

Recently I was talking to an executive of a CAD company that competes directly with PTC. I told him that a PTC employee referred to his company as a “just a parts company” that will never succeed with a holistic approach to PLM.

“PTC people must have a class in one-liners to bash the opposition,” I told him. “They come up with so many of them.”

“I used to work at PTC for six years,” my interviewee told me. “They do have a class on that, as a matter of fact.”

Imagine that, a class in how to put down the competition with one-line zingers! What a novel idea.

I wonder where you get a curriculum for teaching people the art of the one-liner. The modern masters of the one-liner have recently passed away. I’m thinking first of Jerry Orbach, who played wise-cracking Detective Lennie Brisco for years on Law & Order after a long career on Broadway.

Jerry Orbach, whose character Det. Briscoe once looked at a corpse in a tuxedo and said, “How convenient, he came dressed for his own funeral.”

And we must not forget the great Rodney Dangerfield, who milked his trademark line “I get no respect” into a 40-year career.  The ‘no respect’ bit was all too true. After starring in and/or writing nine successful feature films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences denied his request for membership.

Then it dawned on me. PTC CEO Dick Harrison didn’t go to business school; he majored in English Literature at Penn. He must have learned the art of witty repartee while pulling all-nighters on Shakespeare and Swift.

    

Rodney Dangerfield (left) and Dick Harrison: Twins separated at birth, or spiritual kinsmen in a common cause?

 

Today PTC published an open letter to CoCreate customers from CEO Richard “Dick” Harrison, welcoming them to the PTC happy family. Sifting the usual marketing drivel from the interesting stuff, the news seems to be that CoCreate will continue as a product line.

As CEO, Harrison gets first dibbs on all new acquisitions.

Harrison said PTC will:

• Maintain, enhance and further develop all CoCreate products indefinitely, including OneSpace Modeling, OneSpace Drafting, OneSpace Model Manager, OneSpace Drawing Manager, OneSpace Live! and OneSpace.net;
• Continue to offer all CoCreate solutions as stand-alone offerings.
• Integrate CoCreate solutions with complementary PTC solutions (such as the earlier acquisitions from MathCAD, ITEDO, and Arbortext, as well as existing PTC products including Windchill).
• Drop the term “dynamic modeling;” from now on, PTC will refer to CoCreate’s history-free approach as “explicit modeling.”

Also today, a note from Ulrich Mahle, VP Marketing and R&D for the CoCreate division, says that OneSpace 2008 will go to product stabilization and QA after Christmas. He promises the 2008 edition will offer a new approach to creating patterns of user-defined form features, such as sets of faces building a boss or a pocket. Once defined, a form feature can be applied to the model repeatedly. For example, Mahle says, a user could position several instances equally in a circular arrangement. It will also be possible to unshare features from the pattern for individual modifications, and a feature can also be modified and the modification used in other features shared in the pattern definition.