According to PTC ceo Richard Harrison, the future of CAD is not CAD, but data:
The CAD market is nice and we have the best CAD products. But we have really become a data management PLM company with the best authoring too,l Pro/ENGINEER.
If you really want to be in a growth market going forward-- The CAD market is going to be low single digits [less than 9% annual growth] for everybody. The action in the next five years is going to be in the data management space, in:
- Connecting diverse companies around the globe
- Connecting their supply chains.
- Helping them collaborate.
Even the community aspect (or the social product development aspect) of building products more easily with those supply chains, that is where the action and the growth is going to be.
I'm not surprised that PTC has this view, given that Windchill forms a major part of their revenues and has been the primary growth driver of sorts for them over the past several quarters. I will also not be surprised if a company like Autodesk doesn't subscribe to this thought. Why? Because Vault/Data Management is not their focus. Making sweeping projections like "future of CAD", as opposed to "future of PTC" is not uncommon as companies (PTC is not the only one, everyone does it) try to 'steer' demand to their own advantage. Fair enough.
However, if PTC's claim were to be true, for its own sake, a recent blog post by Kenneth Wong discussing "What PLM can learn from social media" (http://www.deskeng.com/virtual_desktop/?p=536) might be a worthwhile read. If PTC really believes that data management will be key in the future CAD world, getting Windchill to be a "people-ready PLM" (as discussed in Kenneth's post) should be the focus.
Posted by: Debankan Chattopadhyay | Jul 30, 2009 at 12:35 AM
This should send a wake up call to the existing Proe users. Is money being spent on Proe R&D.
It would be nice to see PTC break out the R&D spendings numbers as it relates to product. I dought they would do that because we know where the money is going.
Concerned Proe User.
Posted by: Steve | Jul 30, 2009 at 07:47 AM