Q'n A withPTC CEO

Jason Stamper interviews Richard Harrison, described as "CEO of product lifecycle management and enterprise content management vendor PTC" -- no CAD to see here here, just move along, please.

When asked about growth, Mr Harrison does not compare PTC to other CAD vendors: "...we are outgrowing major enterprise applications companies like Oracle and SAP on organic growth."

And he doesn't see Autodesk as a competitor, because, well, they do CAD:

We don't generally think of Autodesk as a competitor. We think Dassault, UGS, and SAP are our three big competitors. Autodesk is stronger at individual productivity tools. We think we are more of a PLM company, though yes, Pro/Engineer is a desktop CAD product that competes with Autodesk.

In sharing APIs with competitors, Mr Harrison notes that the agreements with UGS, Autodesk, and SAP are just five years long. And that Dassault continues to keep to themselves -- contrary to their "everyone" manifesto: "But we have repeatedly invited Dassault and they have so far refused."

Comments

[Rob Vanden Heuvel]

Speaking only for myself, of course, the impression that I got is that Mr. Harrison was being diplomatic in his answers given the context.

Over the past 4-5 years, PTC has demonstrated very clearly that it is committed to continuous improvement of Pro/ENGINEER in the CAD space in order to preserve their power and stability advantage over other mid-range programs while also being scalable enough to compete more than ably against the high-end packages. Their R&D budget and Wildfire releases prove this.

PTC recognizes that the greatest growth will come from the PLM market and Mr. Harrison tries hard to stay on message. The PLM footprint and architecture that PTC offers is also a big differentiator versus the competition. For companies that may not need more capability than a SolidWorks or Inventor supplies (and who aren't aware or interested in other CAD level differentiators), the broader product development process that PTC is uniquely positioned to optimize is a big advantage.

PTC would be foolish not to leverage this advantage and to, at every opportunity, broaden the conversation from "mere CAD" to the level of "product development" or PLM.

Talk CAD details to a CEO or VP Operations and his eyes will glaze over. But talk PLM and you'll be talking more his language.

Rob Vanden Heuvel
Calgary, AB

[John]

Not everyone agrees with your assessment about PTC's commitment to their CAD products.

Here are some comments I received from an ex-ProE (8 years) user a couple of days ago:

"Overall, I'm very happy with SolidWorks. What amazes me in the last few years of following SW closely is that each annual release of software the company is adding innovative, actually useful features to the program. The capability improves and efficiency goes up. Pro/E has never been like that. The annual releases of PTC were mostly "hey, they finally fixed that damn bug this year" type of stuff. And then when they switched to Wildfire to copy the interfaces of SW and Inventor and attempt to be user-friendly, they reintroduced half the bugs they fixed in the legacy version of the software."