|
Pro/User 1999 ConferenceDallas, Texas Email Newsletter no. 2delivered to your desktop courtesy of Sun Microsystems As before, this newsletter is just written by one person, and the more people who contribute their notes and comments the better. Since I arrived only late Mon., and left Wed. at 2:30pm (to try and observe my 25th wedding anniversary), some portions of the agenda just aren't covered at all. Including the PTC Ask the Experts session, Wed. 3:00 to 4:00pm, usually a mine of information. If anyone has some notes from that session please do post them, thanks. Peter Nurkse Topics in this issue:
Where Are the UsersWhen you come back from an event like the Pro/User conference, all your co-workers who stayed behind usually expect you to return with all kinds of practical user specific advice and tips. But the Pro/User schedule is skewed a different way, towards PTC and other vendors. Here's the breakdown of hours of presentations in those 3 categories, per the conference schedule: Hours of presentations
So, there it's evident, that's why you might find user type information harder to find. Users come in third place by total presentation time on the schedule. Obviously PTC and the other vendors have trained staff whose job responsibilities actually include making professional presentations at Pro/User. While it's a rare user who even gets recognized back at work for doing a presentation, much less has that in their job description. And trained professional presenters will do a more pleasing job. But nothing can replace user knowledge and experience, and certainly PTC and the other vendors can themselves learn a lot from user knowledge and experience. How could user participation in the next conference be improved? Here are some ideas, just by way of brainstorming. Even though PTC and the other vendors are willing and able to fill the schedule, still at a user conference user participation should be worth encouraging:
These are just some ideas. A key point might be interactive user presentations, using the software, live. Most of those 30 min. user presentations could probably have been a full hour, easily: 1/2 hr. to describe the subject, using PowerPoint, and 1/2 hour to show it, using Pro/E. Right now the main software package user presenters get to use is PowerPoint, not Pro/E. Original Top Ten ListI received a copy of the original Top Ten Reasons to Trust PTC list, as read out Monday afternoon, right before Dick Harrison took the podium. Here it is: 10. "PTC shipped your manuals weeks ago". 9. "Pro/Intralink is now ready for production use". 8. "PTC developers are using Pro/Toolkit to develop all new Pro/E functionality". 7. "PTC has raised maintenance fees because the user community wants it". 6. "PTC changed from a regular 2 release per year cycle to fewer releases because users couldn't keep up". 5. "You will recieve the new software CD within a couple of days". 4. "The new product restructuring is bundled to give more value to the customer". 3. "PTC wants to be your partner in CAD design. The local PTC office will continue to address your Pro/E questions, evan after you have purchased Pro/E". 2. "Revision 19 is a major release. It is not Rev 18+". 1. "Sales reps will still treat you respectfully at the end of the quarter". So, same basic issues as the second list read out on Tuesday: software reliability, scepticism, and open lack of trust. Problems PTC has to overcome on the way to being a trusted data management vendor. Great Tool, Good ApproachSomething has happened to the TAN Tracker in the Customer Service section of the PTC Web site. I have to confess I never did spend much time with the old version, but it has been radically re-thought to match user needs. With a certain open and straightforward attitude, even better. If this is the general direction PTC is going, that's great, trust may increase between PTC and customers, that's probably the key for future PTC success, nothing else that important. As in any other relationship, with some trust most problems can be addressed, but without trust there's not much chance of improvement. The TAN Tracker gave you a way of locating open software issues, or bugs. But it was a jumble of information, difficult to relate to any particular situation. So Customer Service thought about it, and decided that most users would probably want to get a general overall list of bugs when considering whether to migrate from one rev. to another. For example, the infamous R18 to R19 move: does R19 have enough new fixes to be worth the effort? Or from R18 to R20, or from R19 to 2000i, etc. True, most of us users probably thing of a bug list as something to use to beat up on a software vendor, one of the privileges of being a user. But in actual fact, the practical use of a bug list is probably more what Customer Service has in mind with the new TAN Tracker, to make a rational decision which version of software to use. So, the new TAN Tracker lets you select from a wide variety of PTC software (Pro/E, but also CADDS5, and Optegra, and Intralink, and probably anything else you've heard of), and a wide variety of versions (not back as far as R1 of Pro/E, though), and then cranks out a list:
Discouraging always, the new problems that didn't exist before, but normal in the software industry. By giving customers an easy and convenient method to sort out bugs for practical information, PTC is probably setting some new standard in the industry. If people have experience of any other software vendor providing a similar tool, perhaps they can compare it. TAN Tracker is actually pretty impressive, both for ease of use and study of what people really need. You can demo it to managers, and anybody else who'll stop by, no requirement for any knowledge of Pro/E to appreciate it. If you find holes in TAN Tracker (and it's a new tool, there should be holes) report them to PTC. No fair taking pot shots at the new TAN Tracker until PTC has a chance to fix any holes. Privileges of Being a UserTalking of the privileges of being a user, a developer at one software company (not PTC) years ago put up a sign over his desk: "Please, in my next life, let me come back as a user". Being a user isn't all that bad, really, compared to being a developer. Management SessionAs usual, the PTC Management Session Tuesday morning was a mine of information. Here are notes: - no single PDM package in the future, Intralink and Optegra and Windchill will all continue to be supported separately, with Intralink and Optegra sometimes integrated with Windchill as well. Even Pro/PDM will be supported indefinitely (not forever, just until a decision is made not to support it further). - there probably has been some disconnect at PTC with the sales force on data management, because last Oct. Windchill was made into a separate division on its own. As of April 1st that move was reversed, and Windchill was folded back into the main data management groups. - Pro/PDM, Windchill, and Intralink are all one development group now, sharing resources. - PTC has some presence in the auto industry, in powertrain design and styling (especially now that PTC owns ICEM Surf, which is used by every major auto maker except for Chrysler and Nissan, to design exterior sheetmetal). PTC now has vertical industry teams in several main application areas: automobile, shipbuilding (sounds like Computervision), aerospace, and consumer electronics (side note: if you're in one of those areas, might be worthwhile to find your team members in Waltham). - Medusa has a good future, and is being worked on at a number of development sites. Medusa in fact is being used as a foundation platform for the next generation of electrical diagram products from PTC, with a Windchill backend to manage associativity. A 3rd party interface is available to Pro/E. (side note for those who've never heard of Medusa: it's one of the everlasting survivors among CAD packages, because it was carefully crafted 20 years ago for needs of drafters, for 2D drawing. Use by PTC as a diagram products foundation sounds reasonable, good choice, right tool for the job). - A year ago Division made money by selling licenses for their foundation Mockup and Virtual Reality software, and gave away the client viewer licenses (now called Product Viewer) for nothing. Why is PTC charging $2k for each floating client viewer license now? PTC hasn't looked at this issue yet, but is concerned to reduce the client viewer cost. It's right now the end of quarter, so, if you want to negotiate about client licenses with your sales rep., to do a "cost effective implementation", go ahead (that was Mark Hodges, marketing VP, who said that, if your sales rep. wants to know who said that). - poll taken of people using Linux in the audience: few, but more than 6. People who took the Web site poll on Linux were greater. PTC will release Pro/E, Mechanica, and Intralink on Linux, "soon", but there are problems still with graphics support and other issues. - yes, salespeople and AEs have turned over every 6-12 months (no news there). Some salespeople probably won't make the transition from a transaction sales force (take order for modules, a module here and a module there) to a solutions sales force (study customer needs and requirements, long term data management approach). But after that has settled, sales force turnover should go down. Just in case your sales rep. does leave, PTC is putting in place a sales force tool for recording customer data, so you shouldn't have to tell your entire story all over again to the new rep. - average seat price for one seat of Pro/E, as tracked by PTC, has fallen over the last year. Meaning, people are apparently really getting more functionality for less money. - some customers do want tiered maintenance, the freedom to just ask for fixes and updates and to refuse all other customer services (like, the response center). But the response center engineers (over 200 of them world-wide) should be supported as customer advocates, they do go into meetings with product teams to represent customer view points. However PTC may still revisit tiered maintenance, not out of the question. - PTC will continue to acquire companies, currently there are gaps in production planning and product life cycle support, within the PTC product range. - if your 3rd party software vendor has a problem providing timely updates to match new versions of Pro/E, make sure they work with the Strategic Partners group at PTC to get help. PTC realizes that the 3rd party vendors need to update quickly to meet customer needs. There never will be a backwards conversion tool, to take a part or assembly back to a previous rev., because data embedded in new features and functions would be lost going back. - Shrinkwrap is part of base 2000i package, which means people still running ADPIII still get it for free. Not so for Behavioural Modeling, pay extra for that. 65-70% of a current total of 500 development projects are enhancements to existing products. - years ago, Intralink was scheduled to get workflow. Then plan was changed to take workflow from Optegra and implement that in Intralink. Now the plan is to implement workflow in Windchill. - why is there so much development effort on Windchill, when a foundation package like Intralink is unuseable for more than 10 users sitting more than 10 feet apart working on assemblies with more than 10 components? (sorry, I somehow missed the answer to that one, not in my notes). - if you want to know why the ADPIII process modeller wasn't automatically converted to a foundation package, talk to your sales rep. (that's the answer, in full). - the R20 Pre-Production test process has been abandoned, partly because R20 suffered from last minute code being introduced into the main package. Last minute code additions are now unacceptable, witness the development team who were denied a last minute submission to 2000i (as mentioned in the last report). - PTC recently did a webcast on Behavioural Modeling to 1200 people at their workstations, with help from HP. There were 11000 attendees world-wide to the Customer Appreciation day. - PTC is implementing the same phone system and call tracking procedures at all the response centers. 6 out of the 9 response centers world-wide are ISO 9000 certified now, the rest will be by 2000. There will be an new license management site on the Web, so you can get licenses immediately without going through a PTC license rep. (note: that site is now up, a week after the conference). Services will be using push technology, to send out information to customers who subscribe to lists in different areas. Services now has consultant groups on quality and on regulated industries. - PTC and Rand are both involved with customers with annual revenues between $10mil and $100mil. That's vital to Rand, to be able to attact staff by offering broader challenges. There was confusion about the transfer of customers with under $10mil revenues to Rand, that change was "too fast". Rand has invested in call tracking and software, and has call centers in the US and Europe. Rand customers can get Rand on-line info at the Rand site, and then login from there to the PTC site if they need more information. |