Members of the press and analysts asked questions of PTC executives Dick Harrison, CEO, Jim Heppelmann, EVP and CPO and Neil Moses, EVP and CFO. Questions and answers are paraphrased.
What will constitute new customers for PTC? AutoCAD users in US and Europe?
PTC does not make that information available.
Do you have a problem with piracy in China? What are you doing about it?
Yes. We are working with the Chinese government. We'd rather make [pirating] companies into paying customers than prosecute.
Will future growth be organic or through acquisition?
2/3 of growth in future will be due to organic growth, the rest from acquisition.
How will PTC break away form single digit growth that seems typical of the industry at present?
Seeds need to be nurtured. We have big expectations from Arbortext and Windchill. We are hopeful of our new relationship [now 5 months old] with IBM and emerging markets such as China.
Does PTC offer PLM for mid-market?
Our present products are well suited to the small and mid-market. We are the only ones to offer hosted PLM. [ed. actually Arena Solutions has hosted PLM. PTC corrected this later but put down Arena as too low end].
Is PTC #3 in the MCAD market?
Not sure where that number comes from. PRO/E is by itself a $500M business, UGS makes $600M but that is split between Solid Edge, UG NX and I-deas. SolidWorks is about $200M. I'm not sure what Inventor numbers are.
How are you converting AutoCAD users?
2D to 3D is driving our VAR business. 2D users are all ending up with SolidWorks, Inventor or Pro/E.
Which company are you taking the most accounts from?
MatrixOne [ed: MatrixOne is a PLM company recently acquired by Dassault]
Can you compare acquisitions PTC makes with UGS and Dassault?
They are buying weaker companies that are not leaders in their industries.
PTC's comment about "buying weaker companies, not leaders in their field" is simply untrue. SolidWorks is definitely a strong company and without a doubt a leader in the field of MCAD. In many areas, far ahead of PTC, Particularly in the area of "nickel & dimming" us modules I would consider essential for basic productivity.
Posted by: Mitchell | June 08, 2006 at 10:44 AM
Yes i agree that they use PTC products for Powertrain, but isn't a victory defined by how much a company buys and uses? The Toyoto deal was 1 billion for V5 vs 12 million. I just dont see companies investing 1 billion with PTC. Nokia replaced SDRC with V5 after a 6 month evaluation of UG and PTC Wildfire
Posted by: john | June 08, 2006 at 10:42 AM
John,
There's more to manufacturing automobiles than just chassis design... PTC's strength (and usage at Toyota) is in powetrain.
Posted by: | June 07, 2006 at 06:38 PM
Its interesting that PTC is taking accounts in the PDM sector. What accounts have they flipped in CAD. They talk about Toyota but Toyota announced that they now have ~3000 licenses of Catia turned on since their recent purchase of V5
Nokia move from UG products to Catia.
these are significant customers in our industry. With these companies adapting V5 maybe we should look seriously at V5
Posted by: John | June 06, 2006 at 07:16 AM
It looks to me that Dassault is sticking to its engineering roots by purchasing Abacus which is a leader in non linear analysis where as PTC aquisitions seem to be away from engineering such as arbor text.
We have ben a long time abacus user along with Proe. We cant even come close to doing our analysis with Mechanica
Posted by: Mike | June 06, 2006 at 07:10 AM