Model business

Acquisitive companies in the CAD/PLM industry are buying up technology to take their flagship products into new areas, in contrast to the slow consolidation that has been the hallmark of the CAD business for the past 25 years.

recently bought CoCreate Software, a competitive provider of product development solutions. CoCreate started life as the spin-off CAD organisation of HP, whose original products, ME-10, ME-30, Solid Designer and Work Manager, developed into the OneSpace brand of today.

PTC will maintain, enhance and develop all CoCreate products, including OneSpace Modeling, Drafting, Model Manager, Drawing Manager, Live! and OneSpace.net. It will continue to offer CoCreate solutions as stand-alone offerings.

The company also plans to integrate CoCreate solutions with the PTC Product Development System (PDS) to offer CoCreate customers complementary product development capabilities, including engineering calculations, dynamic publishing, visualisation, high-speed machining, and enterprise content and process management.

Although some of CoCreate's modelling technology is not an easy fit into PTC's technological framework, the company says it embraces all the accepted approaches to mechanical modelling - parametric, explicit, derived and 2D. It claims to be the only vendor to offer all these technologies to satisfy a customer's specific needs.