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Software

Wildfire. Based on current timelines, it is expected that first customer shipment of the much-anticipated Wildfire release will occur in the first quarter of 2003. Dick Harrison stated three imperatives for Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire: quality, interoperability and the user interface.

PTC is passionate about ensuring that their customers successfully adopt Wildfire and have some very aggressive corporate goals to ensure this happens. They now believe that their job is not complete upon shipping the CD, but that they must also develop products and services that facilitate the adoption of new software releases by its users. To this end PTC has developed a quick reference guide, multimedia introduction, Web-based help, and a menu mapper, all for the release of Wildfire.

One often asked question relates to the stability of the user interface. Over the past several releases, PTC has implemented new features into the interface to improve ease-of-use. These changes require some relearning of functions and have an initial impact on productivity, particularly for experienced software users. This is a major concern for PTC, and is why they opted for a more holistic approach of modifying the user interface, rather than incorporating improvements in a piecemeal fashion. With the release of Wildfire, users can expect the overall interface to stabilize.

It should be emphasized that Wildfire is the outgrowth of extensive focus group studies and interactions with the PTC/USER technical committees. The enhancements now offered with the Wildfire release address user requests and were not developed in isolation. Furthermore, there have been some encouraging studies that show that both novice and experienced users can become far more productive with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire than with previous releases of Pro/E or competing CAD software.

Product Roadmap. PTC is advancing with a unified product roadmap that emphasizes interoperability between its MCAD and Windchill products. PTC also has blended the Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill development organizations so that there is a single focus on the product strategy. The software suite can now be viewed holistically as a product development system rather than a collection of point solutions for MCAD and PDM. The goal is to capture the digital product definition and make it accessible to everyone in the value chain.

Beyond Wildfire, several other areas are slated for attention. One important issue to the user base is managing change. PTC also agrees and is interested in pursuing this with the PTC/USER technical committees. Another area of concern is the sheet metal design module, which is targeted for a complete overhaul after the release of Wildfire. PTC/USER emphasized that a large portion of the user community relies on this module and is counting on PTC’s commitment to enhance this module. PTC/USER also requested improved integration between MCAD and ECAD tools.

Some other important notes:

• With the Summer 2003 release of Windchill 7.0, PDMLink and ProjectLink will be fully integrated with each other and fully interoperable with Pro/ENGINEER. Further integration projects are planned.

• PTC is fully committed to providing continued enhancements to and support for Pro/INTRALINK. Ongoing Pro/INTRALINK development activities are focused primarily on quality, reliability, and solution integration. This includes ongoing development of the Pro/INTRALINK Gateway to provide a tighter connection between Pro/INTRALINK and Windchill product lifecycle management solutions. Furthermore, PTC has plans to enhance and automate multi-site replication tools.

Windchill PDMLink continues to be enhanced and will soon subsume most if not all of Pro/INTRALINK functionality for managing Pro/ENGINEER data. PTC is also developing migration tools to simplify the transition from Pro/INTRALINK to Windchill PDMLink for customers choosing to do so. Customers who have not implemented a PDM solution should take a strong look at Windchill PDMLink first before making any purchasing decisions.

• Pro/INTRALINK will not be supported on Linux. Pro/MECHANICA might be a possibility depending on user acceptance to the Linux version of Pro/ENGINEER.

• Earlier this year, PTC and EDS signed an agreement focused at improving inter-operability of CAD designs between their respective CAD systems. Under the terms of the agreement, PTC and EDS will share toolkit technology and will exchange end-user software licenses. They will have the ability to provide interoperability between their respective product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions.

• Part of the built-in collaboration capability of Wildfire is the peer-to-peer functionality from Groove Technology. Groove has received a strong endorsement from Microsoft, who invested $50 million in this company in October 2001. This should alleviate customer concerns about the integration of third party technology into Pro/ENGINEER.

• Pro/DESKTOP is being repositioned as a basic modeling product to serve the education market. It will be maintained for the foreseeable future in accordance with this strategy.

• A new industrial design tool, Pro/CONCEPT, was recently announced and is intended to be a viable tool for up-front conceptual design.