PTC Targets Key Barriers to Productivity with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0

0806/2009

Press Release PTC; NEEDHAM, MA – New release dramatically increases design efficiency and introduces the industry’s first CAD-enabled solution for social product development.

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), the Product Development Company®, today announced the launch of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, the next major release of its integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software and a key component of the PTC® Product Development System. Pro/ENGINEER, the world’s first parametric CAD solution, continues to extend its market leading position with the delivery of new capabilities to help customers eliminate traditional design barriers to achieve faster, more efficient and more innovative product development. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 is scheduled to be available during calendar Q4 FY2009.

“Global competition, environmental sustainability, and demographic change are the major factors affecting manufacturers today. These translate into multidisciplinary design, design for lifecycle, and social networking for innovation as top priorities for manufacturers to deliver winning products,” said Marc Halpern, research director at information technology research firm Gartner.

 

In today’s complex environment, product development teams often face a number of barriers that can impact productivity. These include the difficulty of making design changes, the length of time to productivity, dealing with heterogeneous CAD data, working with a multitude of disconnected point solutions, and identifying resources and leveraging collective knowledge when needed. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 will offer powerful new capabilities and over 330 enhancements that improve productivity, enrich the user experience and provide the freedom to design without barriers.

Highlights include:

• Make design changes faster and easier!
  Real-time, dynamic editing and disruption-free design will help users overcome the traditional barriers to design modification.
• Accelerate time to productivity by up to 10X.
• User Experience enhancements such as graphical browsing, intuitive UI enhancements, streamlined tasks and faster performance improve design efficiency and reduce time-to-market from concept through production. Create simplified sub-assemblies, place forms and create molded parts up to 80% faster. You can also analyze weldments up to 10x faster and create facing toolpaths 5X faster.
• Provides unsurpassed realism in less time. The Pro/ENGINEER Advanced Rendering Extension will now include high performance rendering technology from mental images. This new integration provides ease of use through quality material presets and real-world illumination models.
  

“Mental images is committed to providing industry-leading, high performance rendering software” said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. “We are pleased to announce our new strategic partnership with PTC for uniting Pro/ENGINEER and mental ray, to deliver state of the art visualization capabilities to product development teams worldwide.”

• Design in a multi-CAD environment faster!
  Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 sets the standard for CAD interoperability. With increased native support for other CAD systems and non-geometric data exchange designers can address the time-consuming and error-prone challenges of working with CAD data from multiple systems.
• Leverage new, seamlessly integrated Pro/ENGINEER applications.
  
  Pro/ENGINEER continues to redefine how we work in today’s highly coupled, multi-disciplinary design environment. New with Wildfire 5.0, Pro/ENGINEER Spark Analysis Extension is the only commercially available product that helps analyze and optimize the electromechanical clearance and creepage properties of designs.
  
  Continued technology leadership and enhancements to industry leading modules such as digital rights management, ECAD-MCAD collaboration, and the newly introduced digital human modeling solution will enable users to save significant time and costs associated with wasteful physical prototyping, production rework and field failures.

The integration of all of these capabilities into Pro/ENGINEER will help to reduce errors, time and costs from using too many disparate/disconnected tools.

• Increase collaboration efficiency with breakthrough social product development capabilities.
  
  Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, the first CAD solution enabled for social product development, will help users remove the communication barriers preventing them from finding the right people and resources at the right time. The seamless integration between Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill ProductPoint, which is built on Microsoft SharePoint social computing technologies, will help users find and reuse their design community’s collective knowledge and improve process productivity.

"Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 offers a broad range of enhancements that will help engineers at Exmark Manufacturing continue to develop long lasting, cutting edge, commercial turf equipment.” said Brian York, Engineering Process Improvement Specialist, Exmark Manufacturing, a division of The Toro Company. “Enhancements such as dynamic feature editing, disruption free design, weldment design, assembly enhancements and other user experience enhancements will continue to allow us to design industry leading, highly innovative products such as our Next Lazer Z."

“Particularly during challenging economic times, customers demand and expect technology leaders like PTC to provide solutions that will help them to address barriers to productivity that can inhibit  them from efficiently creating great products,” said Brian Shepherd, executive vice president, product development, PTC.  “Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 demonstrates PTC’s ongoing emphasis on quality and commitment to deliver capabilities that enable our customers to develop winning products and bring them to market faster and at lower costs.”

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 Upgrades and Product Availability

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 is scheduled to be available during calendar Q4 FY2009* .

*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.

For more information on Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0, please visit the Pro/ENGINEER product pages on www.ptc.com