In an agreement that stands to remove some of the barriers to collaborative product design, product lifecycle management companies Autodesk and Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC) this week announced that they would open the door for greater interoperability between their products.
Under the partnership, the companies will make a number of application programming interfaces (APIs) available to one another, allowing each to create interoperability between their CAD and collaboration products.
Specifically, PTC will gain access to Autodesk's RealDWG developer toolkit, with which it will enable read/write access within PTC products to Autodesk DWG files, including those created in applications such as AutoCAD and Inventor. In turn, Autodesk will be able to utilize PTC's Granite 3D modeling and interoperability kernel to build similar functionality into AutoCAD and Inventor.
Officials from both companies told Managing Automation that they expect to enable read/write access between their respective products, allowing an engineer to work on a file originally created in another application, for instance, and save it in the new file format after modifying it.
"We want to be cooperative in the industry, and it's important for customers that they're able to communicate with people using other CAD packages, so it's important for us," said Amy Brunszel, the Inventor product line manager, in an interview with Managing Automation.
The agreement this week is only a precursor to the product releases that will eventually follow. Brian Shepherd, divisional vice president of product management at PTC, said his company will use the Autodesk APIs to build a bridge from AutoCAD and Inventor to PTC Pro/ENGINEER, the company's 3D CAD product, and to Windchill, its collaboration and data management platform.
Autodesk will focus on creating interoperability between its AutoCAD and Inventor products and PTC's Pro/ENGINEER.
Shepherd divulged few specifics about the timing of the upcoming releases, saying only that PTC expects to "see progress on that in 2007 as part of the normal release cycle of our products." Brunszel was equally reticent, saying Autodesk would not discuss the timeframe for product rollouts.
Across the expanding spectrum of product creation, the exchange of ideas and designs among multiple parties -- and across multiple, varied applications -- is now de rigueur. The agreement between Autodesk and PTC is an acknowledgement by the vendor community that the need for interoperability has grown markedly, and that locking users into proprietary formats flies in the face of today's business needs.
"I think that the basis of competition in our industry used to be on closed file formats and closed partner programs," Shepherd said. "But that really seems to be at odds with customer success."
PTC instituted a pact with fellow PLM vendor UGS a few years ago, Shepherd said, to enable similar interoperability between the two companies' products. "We'd like to" forge a agreement with PLM purveyor Dassault," Shepherd said, "but so far that's not been possible."
Both Autodesk and PTC have reported solid gains in revenue of late, indicating that there is more than enough demand for PLM to go around, at least for now. PTC has stated its plan to be a $1 billion company by fiscal 2008, and closed fiscal 2006 with $854 million in revenue, up 19% from the prior year.
Autodesk, already nearing the end of its fiscal 2007, closed its third quarter with $457 million in total revenue, a 21% jump from the $378 million recorded in the same period last year.
The recent strong performances of PTC and Autodesk are good news for the PLM industry in general, Shepherd said. "But this [interoperability] need really transcends short-term economic issues; this is a long-term business process issue."
This week has been a busy one for Autodesk, as it also announced a partnership with ThomasNet to expand the functionality available to users of Autodesk's Design Review software.
ThomasNet is an online marketplace that connects parts suppliers with buyers of those products. Autodesk's Design Review software allows employees involved in the product design process who do not have access to CAD systems to view CAD files. (ThomasNet is owned by Thomas Publishing, the parent company of Managing Automation.)
In the next release of Design Review, users will be able to highlight a component part within a 3D file and perform a search for more information on that specific part.
That action will bring a user to a Web site co-branded by Autodesk and ThomasNet, which displays relevancy-based search results for resources related to that product -- e.g., product catalogs and company Web sites. The search feature will be offered at no cost to users of the new Design Review release.
According to Erik Mikisch, ThomasNet's vice president of product development, a typical user might be a procurement manager who needs information on companies that can supply a certain valve in a new product's design.
For Autodesk, the enhancement of Design Review can be viewed in light of Adobe's incursion into the collaborative design space with its Acrobat 3D product. The application from Adobe has enjoyed strong demand early in its release. Any improvements to Autodesk's counterpart Design Review application could burnish its standing with users who need to choose between using Design Review and using Acrobat 3D.