A win with BMW
When a CAD vendor sells some software to a significant customer, the accompanying press release can make it sound like the software just replaced all competitors at the significant customer.
For example, when Dassault Systemes announced that Boeing was going Dassault-only, the CAD company admitted later it would take five years just to implement the software, and we all know how implementation schedules run.
In fact, the big deal in all these press releases is the name of the customer, not the software order itself.
So it's refreshing when a CAD ceo admits that a landmark deal isn't actually all that huge, in this case PTC ceo Jim Heppelmann.
First, here's the lead paragraph in a PTC press release from this morning:
PTC announced the BMW Group has selected the PTC Windchill solution as its PLM backbone for production and sourcing bill-of-material (BOM). Windchill will be the enabler for globally configuring and releasing cars to production.
The wording of the press release makes it sound like PTC software is now running BMW, globally. But it's not.
Here is the ceo yesterday describing the, well, insignificance of the size of the deal:
I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves and suggest that BMW is going to standardize on our suite, although I think incremental opportunities will be presented to us...
We didn’t displace every use of PLM and engineering. We didn’t displace their CAD systems.
We were selected as their one and only digitization platform, but we certainly won a very big piece of business right in the middle of their business process. We competed long and hard and, quite frankly, we technically won. They were impressed by our technology, both Windchill and ThingWorx.
...BMW was surprised at what we are capable of doing... We went from not being invited, to the first round, to winning the last run.
The ceo indicated that the deal was worth just north of $5 million.
Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4138220-ptcs-ptc-ceo-jim-heppelmann-q1-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript [Quotes edited for errors in the transcription.]
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