u p F r o n t . e Z i n e

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Issue #644 |  May 4, 2010  |  English Edition

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In This Issue

1. The Difference Between TurboCAD Pro and DoubleCAD XT Pro

     - Redsdk Display Booster

     - Drafting and Detailing Enhancements

 

2. PTC Q2 Up 7% Over Recessionary Year

 

The Difference Between TurboCAD Pro and DoubleCAD XT Pro

IMSI/Design now has two seemingly similar CAD programs, and so I wanted to know how the company planned to differentiate between its 25-year-old TurboCAD and the rather new DoubleCAD XT Pro. Especially after TurboCAD Pro product manager Dave Taylor told me that one program builds on the other: "Stuff that is new in one finds its way to the other." So, what are the differences?

 

DoubleCAD XT Pro            TurboCAD Pro        

Updated 2x a year               Updated 1x a year

AutoCAD-like interface         Unique interface

Primarily 2D                        2D and 3D

DWG file format                  TCW file format

 

"So as the feature sets merge," I wondered, "Will you eventually eliminate one?" No, the plan is to keep DoubleCAD XT Pro (and the free DoubleCAD XT) as the similar-to-but-better-than-LT competitor, while TurboCAD keeps its position as the flagship program for the company.

 

Redsdk Display Booster

The big change in TurboCAD Pro 17 is the new Redsdk display engine from France's Redway3D, technology that turbo-boosts display speed. Employing either software, hardware, or multiple cores, Redsdk speeds up 2D drafting, 3D modeling, and rendered images with a single API. IMSI/design has implemented the first stage, 2D wireframe; hidden line and rendered modes will be added in the future: "This is a long term implementation that affects all areas of TurboCAD," Mr. Taylor explained. The Redsdk will also be in the next release of DoubleCAD XT Pro.

 

Also new in TurboCAD Pro 17 is file compatibility with DWG 2010.

 

Drafting and Detailing

Mr. Taylor walked me through the other improvements to TurboCAD Pro 17:

    - layer filters creates groups of layers that can be turned off and on simultaneously.

    - xrefs can now clip and bind -- even 3D xrefs.

    - multileaders.

    - explodable viewports that extract 2D views of 3D drawings by placing them in new drawings or layouts. As a bonus, this works with all kinds of 3D objects, and is not limited to 3D solids.

    - walls now link, and clean up automatically.

    - new door and window muttins, which are parametric.

 

The new feature that impressed me the most was parametric arrays, in which any ACIS object can be placed along a curve, as spherical and cylindrical pattern, as well as the usual rectangular and polar arrays. TurboCAD Pro 17 retails for $1,295,

 

http://www.turbocad.com

 

PTC Q2 Up 7% Over Recessionary Year

I'm not happy with the quarterly reports of my financial investments. They are showing that my registered retirement savings plan is up 28.27% over the last 12 months. As I tell my wife, the problem is that the increase is just catch-up, following the plunges of late 2008 and 2009. In the same way, shareholder-owned CAD vendors are announcing their year-over-year increases -- relative to a down year. The numbers are not impressive when you realize they are just playing catch up.

 

For Q2, PCT announced revenues of $240.6 million, but it plans to increase revenues through a 35-40% increase in Windchill PLM licenses for the rest of the year, allowing the company to hope that it may return to the Billion Dollar Club by year's end.

 

There is a problem, however: Europe. The slide in the Euro (no thanks to Greece) means American CAD vendors now earn less from Europe, typically a third of their worldwide income. PTC alone lost $18 million due to unfavorable currency exchange rates. How big is $18 million? At the same time, they won 18 deals with $1 million or more. The weak Euro wiped out a lot of that. (In contrast, Europe-based Dassault Systemes benefits from the weak Euro, because it  inflates revenues from North American.)

 

Here are some of the more interesting parts of last week's conference call between PTC executives and financial analysts. (Questions and answers have been edited for brevity.)

 

Jay Vleeschhouwer (Ticonderoga Securities): You made a remark earlier that you've seen  recent surveys that suggest PLM has moved up in priority, and it seems to have taken about a decade for PLM to get there. It had typically been fairly low in priority. What do you think has changed to make PLM now more of a verb and not just an interesting acronym?

 

James Heppelmann (president, PTC): I think companies are saying, "We need to find that next opportunity to bring some business process advantage to our company, and it isn't ERP [enterprise resource planning]. Any advantage we ever thought we had there has matched by everybody else anyway, and there is no next generation of that concept."

 

So I think some of the growth problems you see for SAP is because their market segment has matured, whereas PLM is not at all mature. And I think there's been some real focus shifting to "Hey, this PLM thing is another form of business process advantage, and quite frankly, it maybe a more enduring form of business advantage anyway."

 

 

Ben Rose (Battle Road Research): With regard to these 200 Windchill competitive displacements that you see out there, where you see the greatest opportunity against Dassault, Siemens and Oracle?

 

Richard Harrison (ceo, PTC): Some of the Matrix install base accounts have been particularly vulnerable. They're waiting for the V6 platform, which has been promised now for three years, and it must be imminent at some point. The unified ones have been promised for four years, I don't really know if it's any further along.

 

Both of those systems [from Dassault and Siemens] are still heavily customized deployments. We don't actually see any live deployments out across the world. But when we see customers attempting to deploy them, they're heavily customized, which is again a big advantage for us as we look at our out-of-the-box system.

 

I'd say [our replacements are] 60% Dassault, 30% Siemens, and 10% others, including SAP. If you had to pick a single product that we're having the most success displacing, it would be the Matrix product from Dassault, which, funny enough, is the basis for the V6 strategies. So even the customers who have Matrix are frequently saying, "We're done, we're out. We're not going to V6."

 

 

Yun Kim (Broadpoint AmTech): Can you  talk about what exactly is the end gain for  [Microsoft SharePoint-based] ProductPoint? What does that really mean?

 

Cornelius Moses (cfo, PTC): There are two different angles. For SMB [small and medium business], we're selling an initial ProductPoint offering. We have three more major SharePoint products come into market that would complement that and would provide up sales from that initial ProductPoint sale:

In larger accounts, it gives us a whole new discussion to have in what might otherwise be a difficult account, to sell PLM. So we might go into a large corporation who has a competitor's PLM environment installed and:

So I think it's a new entry point, a new sort of door to penetrate some of the bigger accounts as well. But first and foremost here, it's an SMB strategy in the short term.

 

The Windchill maintenance attach rate is 100%. We require customers to attach maintenance on Windchill. So it's actually higher than Pro/E, and I'd say renewal rates are comparable to Pro/E.

 

 

Alexander Zorovic (Janney Montgomery Scott): M&A [mergers and acquisitions] used to be a very key part of your growth strategy. If you could update us there as to what your thinking is.

 

Richard Harrison: We have the strategy of 20% sustainable earnings growth, and we think that the way we're going to get it is this so-called Win In the Market strategy. PLM is a growing segment. We're going to go on to become the clear leader. We're going to generate a lot of organic growth, and that will be the main part of the 20% earnings growth engine.

 

I characterize it as three-parts revenue growth and one-part margin expansion. Acquisitions can play into this. We have a strategy to get it largely organically, and complement that with that acquisitions. Two areas where acquisitions make sense:

Cornelius Moses: We have this single data model that enables everybody in an organization to know that the product information is true and accessible. And our competitors don't have that.

Dassault with V6 is an attempt to copy Windchill, and Siemens with the unified product is an attempt to do the same thing. While they're trying to do that -- and it's going to take them years,  and we'll see if they're successful -- we've been broadening our footprint. We've already solved that riddle around a single data model.

 

So now we're building out an application footprint that enables our customers to deploy an out-of-the-box solution, and that's important to us. So that's really sort of how we think about it:

Link:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/201587-parametric-technology-q2-2010-earnings-call-transcript

 

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Letters to the Editor

With reference to the letter from William N. Sawtelle in upFront.eZine Issue #643, I am another civil engineer still happily using AutoCAD Release 14. We recently decided not to renew our two subscriptions to Civil 3D 2009, partly for financial reasons, and partly because we weren't actually using them. My business partner and I both prefer the speed and familiarity of R14, which has been extensively customized with in-house written LISP routines.

    I was one of the early adopters of AutoCAD way back in the mid-1980s when it was the only affordable alternative to mainframe CAD programs, and I welcomed the advances that arrived in every new version up to R14.  Unfortunately, subsequent versions became slower and slower to load and run, without providing any significant extra functionality.  In my humble opinion Autodesk is rapidly becoming an expensive dinosaur just like the mainframe CAD vendors that it successfully replaced.

    - Donald Hall,  Donald Hall Associates Ltd  

     United Kingdom

 

 

On the cable in Helsinki one can sometimes listen to NPR [National Public Radio from the USA], and this morning's topic was: Using Virtual Reality To Make Nuclear Reality Safer <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126281862>. It says, "A small team of nuclear specialists at Los Alamos is using software from the entertainment industry -- the kind of realistic animation produced by Pixar, Dreamworks and Industrial Light and Magic -- to create virtual models of nuclear facilities."

     Very interesting, but what happened to the classical 3D system providers for plant design?

     - Menno Huijben

     Finland

 

The editor replies:  ...such as Navisworks. I wonder if this was an experiment to see how other software might work -- or just a PR exercise for Los Alamos, since the media would not be interested in real 3D engineering software.

 

 

As always, I appreciate reading your eZine.

    - Jim Swain

    Synergis Technologies

 

 

Notable Quotable

For people who have lived in the mostly free-for-all environment of the computing industry (and its cousin, the anything-goes world of the Internet), the idea of a Disneyified world is as close as you will get to their concept of hell.

    - Tristan Louis

    http://www.tnl.net/blog/2010/04/29/apple-is-the-new-china/

 

 

Thank You to Our Subscribers & Donators

These great people support upFront.eZine through their contributions of $25 (or more). Thank you, guys!

 

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   - Rachael Dalton-Taggart      

 

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