PLM for Everyone (cont.)
Continued from May 2005 Main Page
Several recent events highlight our active pursuit of open solutions and support for standard platforms.
For example, at PLM World, attendees saw many new and innovative products built on the UGS foundation by participants in the UGS Partner Program. There were over 20 such partners that exhibited their solutions in our partner showcase. Each extends the UGS foundation by building custom applications that do everything from providing interfaces to other enterprise systems, like SAP, to customizations for particular vertical industries like cabinet making, through high powered analysis and simulation tools for the electronics industry. Although their applications are varied, they have all made an investment in the UGS foundation and have chosen in many cases to exclusively offer their products in the UGS environment. The decision to partner with UGS is driven by both the comprehensive toolkit we provide our partners and the strong position we have in the market.
Other partners exhibited applications that expand the utility of JT data. From an applications based on JT interoperability to those based on JT integration and still others based on JT as a publish view format, the viability and robustness of the JT Open community was clearly on display. We ourselves recently announced the new JT2Go-JT Open Edition, which enables users to view 3D JT data directly in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents with embedded JT2Go viewers.
This year's PLM World also saw the first meeting of our Partner Advisory Council, a group of partners from all categories and competencies that will help us further provide support for our partners in development, marketing and sales efforts. The PAC will be meeting a few times in the coming months to set the agenda for improvement and expansion of the UGS partner community.
In track sessions at the conference, we outlined how we are extending our foundation technologies for both NX and Teamcenter. Specifically, we presented details on the new NX automation platform that provides optimum flexibility for creating custom automation applications, while at the same time preserving existing automation investments. Within the Teamcenter track, openness was an important issue as Teamcenter forms a PLM foundation that provides open access via APIs and standards transport mechanisms like PLM XML and JT, all available through our partnership program. Proof points of this openness were demonstrated during the many product presentations that included Teamcenter as the foundation for Tecnomatix and the NX managed development environment (MDE).
Our openness and commitment to partnering was also evident at the recent 2005 Global Automotive Summit where we demonstrated our support for Microsoft's Peak Performance Initiative. We utilize Microsoft platform technologies such as Microsoft SQL Server and Windows SharePoint Services to deliver Teamcenter-based PLM solutions that support the four key areas of the Peak Performance Initiative: Increasing innovation during product development cycles, reducing complexity on the shop floor, increasing supply chain visibility and leveraging design and manufacturing data for service. UGS' collaboration with Microsoft is helping to expand PLM usage beyond its traditional product design roots.
These recent events are just part of our ongoing commitment to openness in the way we do business and develop technology. The fundamental elements of our approach are:
- Open Business Model - UGS provides core components of its technology to all, regardless of potential competition. This forces us to constantly innovate to stay ahead and gives our customers greater choice of compatible products.
- Communities for Open Innovation - UGS acts as catalyst to bring together groups of common practice, including customers, partners and adopters that work together to bring new innovations to market.
- Open Architecture - All UGS products are architected to facilitate access to every level of operation, including user interface, program APIs, functional components and data model.
- Open Applications - The UGS portfolio of PLM applications can be deployed as stand-alone applications, or integrated within the full suite of applications that constitute the customer PLM environment, including all of the customer's chosen applications from any of their partners
- Open Data Model - UGS gives customers control over their intellectual property by providing open access to the common semantic data model shared by all of our applications, the lifecycle data architecture.
This approach gives companies the freedom they need to create solutions that exactly suit their unique innovation challenges and interoperability that builds their competitive edge. Ultimately it is this degree of openness that will unlock the full potential that PLM can bring to virtually any company where product-related innovation is key to business success.
