PTC, The Product Development Company, unveiled Creo design software. Creo is being designed as a scalable suite of interoperable, open, and easy-to-use product design apps.

The Creo vision and strategy, first introduced in June at the PTC/USER World Event as Project Lightning, recognizes that product development involves many different users with different needs at different points in the product lifecycle. Unlike solutions to date, Creo is designed to remedy lingering, unaddressed problems that have plagued CAD for decades.

“Creo is being specifically created to solve the big problems remaining in the mechanical CAD
market: usability, interoperability, assembly management and technology lock-in,” said James
Heppelmann, president and CEO, PTC (left). “By providing the right-size product design apps for
each participant in a company’s extended product development team, Creo will enable more
people to participate earlier and more fully in the product development process, significantly
expanding innovation capacity.”

“Historically companies have made significant investments in CAD applications that bind them
into inflexible business processes and design practices dictated by the specific visual authoring
or simulation application that they pick. PTC's game-changing vision to release a highly flexible
CAD application in a new code base, while sticking to existing file formats under the Creo portfolio, is expected to rejuvenate the mature CAD market and open up a path for non-PTC CAD users to move easily on a flexible visual design platform,” said Sanjeev Pal, research manager, IDC.

Highlights of planned apps include:

AnyRole Apps

• Will offer customers the right tool, for the right user at the right time, enabling everyone in the organization to participate in the product development process. The result: new ideas, creativity, and personal efficiency are unlocked.

AnyMode Modeling

• Will enable users to incorporate data from any CAD system and unlock multi-CAD design efficiency and value. Valuable information created throughout the product development process in the Creo product design apps will be able to be accessed and reused by others throughout the product development process. Further, Creo will enable reuse of data from legacy systems, reducing the typically high switching costs which drive technology lock-in.


AnyBOM Assembly

• Will give teams the power and scalability needed to create, validate and reuse information for highly configurable products. Using BOM-driven assemblies and a tight integration with PTC’s Windchill PLM software, customers will be able to unlock and realize unprecedented levels of efficiency and value across teams and the extended enterprise.

“We believe Creo could be significant and a positive advance in PTC's product offerings.” said Mike Galbraith, Global Engineering Systems & Services, Tyco Electronics. Creo could allow the teams involved in designing new products and bringing them to market...across different functions, different locations, etc... to productively use the same toolset throughout the product life-cycle process. We're looking forward to working with PTC and their other partners in shaping these new capabilities."