2004 PTC/USER Nashville ConferenceDaily Email Day 1written by Kelly Bryant, Teknovation, Inc. After having missed the past several annual meetings, I have been looking forward to this year’s conference with a new enthusiasm. It has been good to see old friends and colleagues with whom I’ve worked with over the years. Since Peter Nurkse from Sun isn't attending the conference this year (and sending out his famous conference updates), I'll try my hand at providing a bit of an update each day. As president of my own company, I am approaching this conference with a new perspective on discovering products, processes, or information that I can bring to my customers. With the theme of DISCOVER, this meeting is packed full of product updates, best practices sessions, expert user presentations, and partner presentations. I hope you’ll discover a bit of trivia about the PTC/USER group in these daily briefings. Today's topics: GeneralThis is the 15th annual conference the PTC/USER group has hosted. It is a far cry from that first one in 1990 with about 125 users in attendance in the Boston area. As far as I can determine, there is only one person who has attended all 15 conferences, Don Patterson of Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Fla. From the beginning, Don has contributed much to this organization including starting and hosting the e-mail exploder and serving on the PTC/USER Board of Directors. This year he is retiring from the board, and he will be greatly missed. After several years of holding the conference in Boston, it was moved to Orlando. Since then, the conference has rotated between the East and West Coasts, and central United States. This year there are about 1,300 attendees. What are those NERDTags?Attendees at the conference this year are the first in the world to be using nTAG, an interactive badge system. Created from research at the MIT Media Lab, these little jewels have eliminated the need to carry around business cards. They also provide conference planners with immediate feedback about sessions. Basically it works like this: Contact information for each attendee is programmed inside a nTAG badge. It has the capability to beam your information directly to another badge. It is then all uploaded to the nTAG Web site at www.ntag.com. At the conclusion of the conference, you'll be provided a link to your personal page and can then download the information you received from other attendees at the conference. PTC Corporate UpdatePTC has spent the last three years revitalizing its product line. Company officials realized that some updates were needed to regain some market share in the low-end MCAD market. CEO and President Dick Harrison talked about the 20-year history of PTC including product launches like Windchill and ProjectLink, and acquisitions like Computervision and OHIO-DA. A few numbers of note from PTC:
Harrison predicted more to come in the electronic product definition acquisitions. The integrated product development system (PDS) is not just MCAD or data management, but is Create (Pro/ENGINEER), Control (Windchill PDMLink), and Collaborate (Windchill ProjectLink). Brian Shepherd, Sr. VP for Product Management, gave a forward-looking talk about upcoming products. He described Wildfire K-03 (likely to be released Q3 ’05) which should contain improvements to:
Wildfire L-01 (likely late 2006):
Windchill X-05 (likely Q2 ’05):
Windchill X-10 (Q2 ’06):
PTC is investing $100m+ per year in product development. Jim Heppelmann, Executive VP, Software Products and Chief Product Officer, described last year as a good year for PTC. Windchill 7.0 shipped 1/04; Wildfire 2.0 shipped 4/04
Regards, |