PTC TAKES ITS CREO PLATFORM TO THE CLOUD WITH CREO+ LAUNCH AT LIVEWORX EVENT

» The company continues on its journey to offer its industrial software products on a software-as-a-service basis with PTC Atlas as a common cloud platform

At its Liveworx event in Boston in mid-May, PTC announced the release of Creo+, the company’s first software-as-aservice (SaaS) version of its Creo CAD software, as well as the version 10 update to older sibling Creo.

Brian Thompson, general manager of Creo at PTC, was welcomed on stage to make the announcement by PTC CEO Jim Heppelmann during the latter’s opening keynote. “This is one of the most exciting developments I’ve seen in my 15 years in the CAD business,” said Thompson. “We called it Creo+, because it’s everything you love about Creo, plus a lot more.”

Creo+ is the latest in a string of PTC products to receive the ‘plus’ treatment and be released as a SaaS version on Atlas, PTC’s common cloud platform. They include Windchill+ (a SaaS version of the company’s product lifecycle management software), Vuforia+ (for developing and managing virtual and augmented reality applications), and Kepware+ (for industrial connectivity).

“We chose the name Atlas because, like in mythology, our Atlas is designed to carry the whole PTC SaaS world on its shoulders,” said Heppelmann.

The big talking point for Creo+ is its support for dynamic real-time multi-user collaboration. To illustrate this point, Brian Thompson showed a demo, depicting four engineers working simultaneously on a design for the main rotor assembly of a helicopter.

“They’re designing. They’re reviewing the changes of other team members. They’re branching designs to evaluate possible changes they want to make. And then they’re selectively merging what changes they want to keep,” he said.

These branching and merging capabilities are taken from Onshape, the SaaS CAD supplier acquired by PTC in 2019. (For more on this, see the box below.)

Creo+ is fully upwards compatible from on-premises versions of Creo and is built on the same core technology as Creo, so no data translation is needed.

In terms of Creo 10, the big talking points were the ability to design and simulate with composite materials, for lighter products that maintain strength and durability. These features enable users to design plies and cores, including cross sections and resulting geometry properties; simulate draping and composite structures for analysis; and manufacture drape and flat patterns, with automated ply book creation and digital work instructions.

Creo 10 also includes new simulation capabilities, thanks to PTC’s ongoing partnership with Ansys, including thermal stress, non-linear materials and contact simulation. The inclusion of these capabilities, according to PTC, “significantly broadens addressable simulation-driven design use cases in Creo.”

However, it’s fair to say that it was new arrival Creo+ that received the most attention from executives — and there is good reason for that. As Heppelmann explained, it is clear to him and his team that SaaS is the direction in which the industrial software market is undoubtedly moving, albeit some years behind more generic enterprise application software such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management) software. And he and his team have learnt a great deal from the acquisitions of Onshape and Arena Solutions, which he describes as “best-in-class examples of the power of SaaS and poster children for how SaaS should be done.”

In short, this is clearly how PTC sees the future. “At PTC now, a full 25% of our business is delivered as SaaS, and this part has been outgrowing the on-premise part by a significant amount,” Heppelmann told attendees. “If you want to digitally transform your business to capitalise on the strategies I’ve been discussing today, and you want to do it in the easiest, fastest and most efficient way, then you will ultimately want PTC’s powerful technology delivered to you as a service.” www.ptc.com

WHAT OTHER ONSHAPE CAPABILITIES MIGHT MAKE IT TO CREO+?

Given that the branching and merging capabilities seen in Creo+ are taken from Onshape, what other Onshape capabilities might be coming to Creo+ soon?

DEVELOP3D posed that question to Brian Thompson, PTC’s general manager of Creo, at the Liveworx event.

His response was unequivocal: product data management. With Creo+, users can store their data locally, or they can use Windchill. “We don’t really have anything in between. Onshape does,” he says.

Onshape’s built-in product data management is a very interesting concept, he continued, particularly to organisations that are not ready for Windchill, but want better control and management of product data.