A. Windchill Release 2.1 introduces three new elements to the Windchill suite, advancing the realization of complete product and process lifecycle management. With this release, PTC establishes Windchill as an integrated enterprise solution for data visualization, data acquisition and data management - critical capabilities that accelerate the flow of critical product and process information throughout the extended enterprise.
The three new components are:
A. Pro/INTRALINK is PTC's premier data management environment for Pro/ENGINEER user communities. Focusing exclusively on managing the Pro/ENGINEER working environment, Pro/INTRALINK facilitates collaboration among design teams and effectively manages the power of Pro/ENGINEER's associativity.
Q. Is there a plan for direct integration between Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill, or will users always need the Pro/INTRALINK Gateway?
A. In response to customer requirements, PTC is committed to providing different options that facilitate integration of product information to the extended enterprise. In addition to the Pro/INTRALINK Gateway, PTC is planning to release a Pro/PDM Gateway that provides connectivity between Pro/PDM and Windchill.
To accommodate situations where the engineering workgroup itself employs multiple CAD systems, Windchill EPM/Direct provides an alternative means for managing this diversity with direct integrations for popular CAD systems including Pro/ENGINEER, CADDS 5, and CATIA . This approach reduces the number of independent databases involved while providing a workgroup solution for managing a heterogeneous CAD environment, simplifying implementation and administration. Windchill EPM applications and the Pro/PDM gateway will be available later this year. Customers may choose either data management/integration that suits their needs.
Q. What level of integration exists between Windchill and Info*Engine?
A. Because Windchill Foundation and Info*Engine both rely upon the use of standard HTTP technology as a means to achieve integration, Foundation and Info*Engine already exhibit a natural level of meaningful integration at their current release levels. For example, it is easy to weave web pages containing information acquired from foreign systems into a Windchill deployment, and it is equally straight-forward to store hyperlinks in Windchill that point to Info*Engine, which in turn can retrieve information from foreign systems on demand. PTC plans to further increase the level of integration between Windchill Foundation and Info*Engine in Windchill releases 3.0 and 3.1, and to position Info*Engine as the basic Windchill integration framework. This framework allows lifecycle applications based upon Windchill Foundation to leverage information assets resident in legacy and incumbent information systems.
Q. What are your plans for future integration of Windchill and Info*Engine?
A. Using Info*Engine, a Windchill user may query an external information repository, find and select the desired information, and create a proxy object that references the external information. The proxy object may then be used in various Windchill applications in place of the external data (which is just a mouse click away). Additionally, PTC is creating various information gateways that proactively publish information from various workgroup authoring systems (including Pro/INTRALINK, Pro/PDM, and Optegra), automatically creating proxy objects within Windchill when workgroup-level information matures to the point where it is appropriate to share it with the broader enterprise community.
Q. Can I still buy Info*Engine independent of Windchill?
A. Yes, PTC is offering Info*Engine both stand-alone and as an option of Windchill.
Q. What level of interest have you seen in Info*Engine since you acquired auxilium inc. in March?
A. Interest in Info*Engine has been extremely high as the demand for enterprise application integration is paramount to many companies today. Info*Engine capabilities provide seamless integration to legacy applications to a variety of today's leading enterprise applications, including Windchill.
Q. How does Info*Engine facilitate enterprise application integration?
A. Info*Engine provides a general-purpose integration framework that enables legacy information to be easily incorporated into Web pages and Windchill-based information structures and processes. The Info*Engine architecture uses a combination of an HTTP-based hub (to which references to outsourced data are made) and a series of "adapters" which are capable of extracting information from each legacy information source. Adapters are "driver programs" which are capable of interacting bi-directionally with the destination system using whatever capabilities that system may support and returning results via HTML (when sending information to the user) or XML (when sending information back to the Windchill server). Using Info*Engine, a Windchill user may query an external information repository, find and select the desired information, and create a proxy object that references the external information. The proxy object may then be used in various Windchill applications in place of the external data.
Q. What level of integration exists between Windchill and ProductView from Division Group plc, which you acquired earlier this year?
A. With Windchill Release 2.1 it is possible to use ProductView to view documents, parts, and assemblies that have been checked into Windchill. Windchill launches ProductView and directly passes the appropriate viewable images.
Q. What are your plans for future integration of Windchill and ProductView?
A. Future versions of both Windchill and ProductView will have additional integration in the areas of workflow and structure browsing.
Q. What about Division's other visualization products? Are they being integrated into Pro/ENGINEER?
A. The advanced visualization capabilities previously sold by Division are being offered in the DIVISION product line by PTC, with DIVISION Mockup and DIVISION Reality as the primary licenses. At the time on the acquisition these products were already able to read Pro/ENGINEER data files, so no software changes have been necessary.
Q. Are you continuing to sell ProductView products separately?
A. Yes, PTC is offering ProductView both stand-alone and as an option of Windchill.
Q. When will Windchill Release 2.1 be available to purchase?
A. Windchill Release 2.1 is available as of April 19, 1999.
Q. Do existing Windchill users upgrade for free?
A. All maintenance paying customers will receive Windchill Release 2.1 at no charge.
Q. How many Windchill customers do you have now?
A. PTC is actively engaged in more than 100 Windchill customer implementations.
Q. How many of your Windchill customers have moved from pilot to production?
A. The unique benefit that Windchill offers in the area of implementation is the ability to deploy systems into production quickly. To complement this benefit, PTC's Professional Services Organization has developed a rapid, evolutionary implementation methodology. The methodology focuses on implementing production Windchill applications in an incremental fashion. During the last 3 months, we have seen a significant number of pilot customers move applications into production. As these production implementations are put in place, additional Windchill implementations can be integrated easily using the federation model, or existing implementations can be expanded by extending the data model and employing the PTC methodology. Production customers now include BMW Rolls Royce Aeroengines, Lockheed Martin GES, ABB, Ingalls Shipbuilding, Gemplus, British Aerospace and PTC.
Q. Has adoption of Windchill been stalled, or sales postponed because of the focus on Y2K issues?
A. On the contrary, Windchill adoption has been accelerated as many customers increase their movement toward true Web-based applications. In some cases, customers have identified Windchill as a solution to help achieve Y2K readiness.
Q. What are the major enhancements planned for Windchill Release 3.0?
A. The primary theme for Windchill Release 3.0 is Enterprise Product Modeling (EPM). Windchill EPM provides the engineering community a flexible product modeling environment with capabilities to manage the computer aided design (CAD) and analysis activities that generate a major source of product definition information. But more importantly, when viewed in the context of the bigger picture, Windchill EPM unleashes valuable product information created by engineering so that participants in upstream and downstream business processes across the extended enterprise can add further value to that product information, resulting in a complete definition of the product.
Q. Are you planning an additional major release of Windchill this year?
A. Windchill Release 3.1 is scheduled for the fall of 1999. The focus of this release will be the Windchill Lifecycle Applications for Component and Supplier Management (CSM).