Parametric Technology Corporation
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{{Infobox Company | company_name = Parametric Technology Corporation | company_logo = Image:Ptc logo.gif | company_type = Public (Template:Nasdaq) | | foundation = 1985 | location = Needham, Massachusettes | key_people = C. Richard Harrison, CEO | industry = CAD/CAM Software | products = See complete products listing. | revenue = Image:Green up.png 744.05M million USD (2005) | num_employees = 3,751 (2006) | homepage = www.ptc.com }}
Parametric Technology Corporation (Template:Nyse) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 40,000 companies worldwide. PTC customers include the world's most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries.
Portfolio
Parametric Technology Corporation engages in the development, marketing, and support of product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise content management (ECM) software solutions and related services worldwide.
PTC has tightly integrated its four core products – Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire, Windchill PDMLink, Windchill ProjectLink, and Arbortext Epic Editor – into the flexible, integral system discrete manufacturers need. With a new, aggressive testing standard, PTC is ensuring that these products work in a seamless fashion across standard business processes.
History
Samuel Petrovich Geisberg previously worked at Prime Computer, ComputerVision (CV) and Applicon. Geisberg founded a new company, PTC, based on ideas that were in the first product Pro/ENGINEER. Geisberg saw that modelers in 1985 were unable to easily modify the boundary representation (BREP) once it was written out. The solution to that problem was to regenerate the BREP from the constructive solid geometry (CSG) representation and its history using ideas that later became a part of the associative engine. This approach gave rise to hybrid modelers which would save both the CSG and BREP and allow a user to regenerate the BREP from the feature history captured in the change state.
The other advantage of PTC was to have a product build in the market-leading UNIX platforms. The management at Prime and ComputerVision thought they had users deeply invested in its workstations along with their engineering data in proprietary formats, but did not see that the days of PrimOS were numbered.
Once an initial version of Pro/ENGINEER was developed and the company received venture capital funding from Charles River Associates, Steve Walsky became the CEO.
This approach was extremely successful financially and caused a major paradigm shift in the CAD/CAM industry. The first response in the market place was a merger of Prime and ComputerVision. Unfortunately, unable to react quickly enough to parametric feature based modeling, unable to raise enough revenue from their new product line, and plagued with internal data translation problems created by internally translating from CV representation to Prime presentation, the merged company, CV, was bought out by PTC as well.