Product lifecycle management stalwart PTC opened the week with a bevy of announcements, most notably the revelation that it has acquired Relex Software Corp., a 23-year-old company that builds software for analyzing and optimizing product reliability. PTC’s acquisition of the 50-person Relex for an undisclosed sum dovetails with the larger trend among PLM providers to outfit manufacturers with a more holistic view of products, from early decisions about market feasibility to a feedback loop that stretches into the consumer world and informs companies about the performance of products in the field. It adds to a string of acquisitions PTC has made to build out its catalog. In a statement today, PTC said Relex’s products help enable early reliability planning and risk assessment, reliability prediction and simulation, reliability reporting, and closed-loop field performance feedback. PTC characterized the merger as a response to “growing demand for solutions that will enable manufacturers to gain early insight into potential risk and reliability issues, predict reliability performance early in the design process, and track reliability against targets during product development.” Relex boasts a welter of blue-chip manufacturers across industries such as aerospace & defense, automotive, high tech, medical devices, oil & gas, and diversified manufacturing. Among the standouts are Boeing, Ford, 3M, Samsung, and Siemens Medical. The company’s Reliability Studio includes modules covering fault and event trees, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), failure reporting and corrective action system (FRACAS) capabilities, human factors analysis, product lifecycle costing, maintainability predictions, Markov analysis, reliability diagramming and predictions, and Weibull techniques. “The Relex acquisition is a key component of PTC's product analytics strategy,” the company statement read. “In today's competitive world, product development organizations are under constant pressure to comply with international environmental regulations, reliability and maintainability requirements, while lowering lifecycle and product costs.” PTC will integrate Relex’s products and staff throughout 2009, with “key members of the Relex management team … focused on helping to integrate the businesses.” PTC revealed few details of the product integration to come, except to say that the company “plans to combine the Relex solutions with its product analytics solutions as well as [develop] integrations between Relex and other components in the PTC product development system.” In related news, PTC took the lid off a number of enhancements to its product lineup, with the 5.0 release of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire software the centerpiece. The latest version of PTC’s integrated CAD/CAM/CAE offering, which will become available in the fourth quarter of this year, places a premium on facilitating efficiency in the product development process. In a statement announcing the release, PTC said that Wildfire 5.0 will facilitate “real-time, dynamic editing and disruption-free design. Productivity enhancements include graphical browsing, a more intuitive UI, faster application performance, and streamlined tasks. In addition, Pro/E’s Advanced Rendering Extension will deliver high-performance rendering technology from partner company mental images that includes quality material presets and real-world illuminations models. PTC also dubs the latest version of Pro/E “the first CAD solution enabled for social product development,” a practice it says involves pinpointing the correct team members and materials during the design process. That ilk of collaboration will be made possible by Pro/E’s integration with PTC’s Windchill ProductPoint, itself built on Microsoft’s SharePoint technology. The PLM company also announced updates across its product catalog, including a new version of Windchill, which now features RequirementsLink, an optional module for managing and tracking product requirements throughout the design process. The RequirementsLink offering will be available in the fourth quarter. Among updates that will be available this month and next are Arbortext IsoDraw7.1, the free collaborative tool ProductView Express 9.1, and the integration of InSight Environmental Compliance, a module of PTC's product analytics software, with Windchill PDMLink 9.1.