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With so many activities going on simultaneously, we can only highlight a few of the general sessions here. For detailed coverage including updated presentations, you can check out several websites:
Sunday HighlightsThe Sunday welcome reception and grand opening of the Exhibit Hall kicked off the conference. Always among the most popular features of the PTC/USER World Event, this year’s Exhibit Hall boasted a record 57,000 square feet with 94 exhibitors and 130 exhibits, including several new attractions such as the Arbortext Pavilion, Product Showcase, and PTC/USER Bookstore. PING set up a driving range and custom fitting center for visitors. Earlier in the day, PING co-sponsored the PTC/USER Golf Classic, our annual golf tournament. The winning team of Rick Passolt, Brian Doffing, and Shane Villafuerte walked away with custom-fitted PING G5 drivers.
Monday Highlights
The General Session was packed with nearly 2000 attendees on Monday morning. Evan Caille, PTC/USER President, opened the conference to a packed house. After briefly reviewing the services offered by the user organization, he talked about the member value survey completed earlier in the year to help prioritize future development. Evan also described the ongoing project to identify a successor to the existing web portal, inviting attendees to view a demonstration of the leading candidate in the PTC/USER booth in the Exhibit Hall.
Master of Ceremonies Ted Bradshaw teaches the audience how to speak "Texan." After introducing Ted Bradshaw, Director of Education and Conferences, it was time for PTC’s two top executives to make their presentations. Dick Harrison, CEO and President of PTC, led off with a corporate update. Dick talked about PTC’s overall approach, which is to provide a product development environment that is both open and heterogeneous, as free of multiple gateways as possible. Dick also mentioned PTC’s goal to make the customer experience pleasant, comfortable and rewarding. Customer satisfaction, as measured by an independent company, is now at the highest levels in the survey’s history. On a ten-point scale, PTC expects to hit a 7.0 rating this quarter. Dick noted that no technology company has ever received a score above 8.0.
PTC CEO and President Dick Harrison On the financial front, the company continues to make progress. Over the past two years, revenue has grown from $660 million to a projected $810-820 million for the current fiscal year, with an operating profit of $120 million. Following its recent acquisitions, PTC has about $200 million in cash and remains debt-free as it has throughout its history. PTC intends to get its margins to about $200 million as it drives toward the $1 billion mark for revenue in fiscal 2008. It will achieve this through both organic growth and additional, high-quality acquisitions. Among other noteworthy comments, Dick also made the following points:
Jim Heppelmann, Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Software Solutions, spoke next with a presentation on “Pushing the Edges of Product Development.” He gave an overview of why PTC bought Arbortext, referring to it as “Pro/ENGINEER for documents” because of the way it structures documents as a hierarchical assembly of components. Separating the content of documents from styling promotes reusability and supports dynamic delivery of publications as changes are made. Documentation is a big task for manufacturers. In Illinois, Caterpillar is the largest publisher behind the state government. Boeing publishes 310 million pages of documentation annually, or about 35,000 pages per hour on average. Even simple products require manuals for assembly, operations, service and training, which may be translated into dozens of languages with multiple formats and delivery channels. Arbortext software provides the flexibility and power to satisfy all of these requirements. Jim discussed the Mathsoft acquisition and the capabilities of its flagship product, Mathcad. Optimized for engineering calculations and tied into Pro/ENGINEER bi-directionally, Mathcad allows predictive engineering to enforce constraints and drive geometry creation. Integration will be released with Wildfire 3.0 (M030). For Wildfire 2.0 and earlier versions, PTC will provide an informal release in July of a toolkit to support integration. You can find more information on Mathcad in the PTC News article in this issue of Pro/files.
Jim Heppelmann, PTC Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Software Solutions. Jim also mentioned the following milestones:
For the Monday afternoon general session, Brian Shepherd, Senior Vice President of Product Management, gave an interesting presentation about the PTC product roadmap and “10 great things” on which the company is working. Some items of note:
Jim Heppelman and Brian Shepherd respond to an audience member's question during the Executive Q&A on Monday afternoon. Following Brian’s presentation, Dick Harrison, Jim Heppelmann and Neil Moses (PTC Chief Financial Officer) returned to the stage to answer questions posed by PTC/USER members. Here are a few of the questions asked: Q. Are PTC developers using Arbortext for documentation? A. PTC is in the process of adopting Arbortext internally. Jim mentioned that he had originally purchased Arbortext for his Windchill developers before joining PTC, but that a substantial documentation system was already in place at PTC when he arrived so that is what has been used since that time. Q. What percentage of revenues goes into R&D? A. 16.5%. Q. What is PTC doing to encourage the next generation of engineers? A. PTC has a strong program in place for engineering education. The company has distributed three million copies of the student editions of Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/DESKTOP to colleges, high schools, and even grade schools. Q. Is PTC planning to support multithreading? A. Windchill is already multithreaded and a series of projects are in place to support multithreading in Wildfire 4.0. Q. The improvements in WAN performance for Windchill PDMLink are welcome, but what about LAN performance? A. LAN performance in 8.0 is not up to the level of 3.x but work is continuing. PTC recently negotiated with Microsoft to implement changes in Internet Explorer that will significantly increase the speed of workspace refresh on clients.
Members enjoying themselves at the PTC Casino Night. The evening concluded in the Exhibit Hall with PTC’s Casino Night reception. Attendees enjoyed delicious food and an open bar, along with various casino games and a special networking event, the “K’NEX® Challenge.” The teams had to include at least one person from each of the learning tracks (Arbortext, Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill). The challenge was to fabricate a structure using K’NEX building sets, with prizes awarded for the fastest, tallest and best designs. Following the event, all of the K’NEX sets were donated to Bryan's House, a local Dallas charity serving children and teens affected by HIV/AIDS. Special thanks to K’NEX International for granting permission to use the “K’NEX Challenge” for the event title.
One of the winning teams from the K'NEX Challenge.
Tuesday HighlightsOn Tuesday morning, attendees socialized with folks from their home regions during the “Meet Your Regional User Group” breakfast. The breakfast tables were organized and labeled with geographic designations for over 70 cities, states, and countries. Following breakfast, attendees met in general session for a keynote presentation by John K. Solheim and Dan Shoenhair of PING. John is grandson of Karsten Solheim, an aerospace engineer who founded PING in 1959. (Trivia buffs: The company name "PING" was suggested by Karsten's wife because of the sound made by the putter when striking a golf ball.) PING holds top positions in the golf marketplace for many of its products, including the number one driver, number two putter brand, number one brand of golf bags, and the number one model of iron.
Product development capability is essential to PING’s success, with about 85% of revenue derived from products introduced within the last two years. Thus, lack of new product in the pipeline can quickly hurt the company. Five years ago, PING embarked on an initiative to formalize its development processes, including the replacement of its existing CAD software with Pro/ENGINEER, which beat out Unigraphics in a benchmark. Subsequent improvements in productivity allowed PING to greatly increase its design output with its current staff and build upon the success of its products. Their tale of cultural and technological progress—and the tripling of new product introductions—was an inspiration to all.
Ted presents gifts to Dan and John following their presentation.
Wednesday Highlights
In the afternoon, six experts from the user community conducted a panel discussion on the topic of Wildfire migration. Pariticipants included Evan Caille (HP), Ed Stevenson (Pelco), Dan Glenn (Solar Turbines), Mike Brattoli (Moen), Paul Crane (John Deere) and Peter Newbury (QFD Consultants). The panel represented quite a variety of implementations in terms of numbers of users, geographic locations, and software revisions used.
Panel members Evan Caille, Mike Brattoli, and Paul Crane listen to a question from the audience. Audience members posed a wide range of questions on such topics as rollout and training strategies, the impact of third-party applications in use with Pro/ENGINEER, whether or not too customize, regression testing, and moving to 64-bit computing platforms. Some important points of note include:
[Editor’s note: PTC/USER plans to offer this session, along with the PING keynote address, as streaming videos. Watch the PTC/USER World Event site (www.ptcuserworldevent.com) for updates soon.] The conference concluded Wednesday afternoon with the closing ceremonies. An abbreviated Town Meeting preceded this year’s PTC Award presentations, celebrating the best of the best in product design. Mark Hodges, Senior Vice President of Customer Care at PTC, announced the finalists from the global online voting. Skoda Automotive won the “best overall” award out of a distinguished field of competitors for their manual gearbox design. You can see all of the winning entries at www.ptc.com/go/awards. The winners of the Best Presentation awards in each of the learning tracks were also announced. They are:
Don’t Miss OutWould you like to attend the conference for free? It’s not too early to think about submitting a paper for next year’s event in Tampa, Florida, to be held at the Tampa Convention Center on June 3-6, 2007. Watch for our Call for Papers coming in November 2006. More details are available at www.ptcuserworldevent.com. We hope to see you in sunny Tampa for an even bigger and better PTC/USER World Event!
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