Corporate

So long, fare well

By Christian Kelley

The two days of intensive product information and exciting customer presentations that was the 2008 media and analyst forum came to a close with an panel question and answer session with the executive team, including Tony Affuso, Dr. Helmuth Ludwig, Chuck Grindstaff, John Graham, Dave Shirk, Bill McClure and Steve Bashada.  A few selected questions and answers, first from those submitted on cards:

Q: Helmuth, do you view Industrial Software as the next step beyond PLM?

A: Industrial software expands on the concept on PLM in two directions: one by including the production world and the other by connecting with ERP, CRM and SCM.

Q: Chuck, can you explain again how Sync Tech is different from what CoCreate or PTC does?

A: The key thing we are doing is taking direct editing, feature recognition and adding state of the art constraint management to be the only solution that does all three simultaneously.

Also take a look at Evan’s take on Chuck’s answer
Q: John, you noted that 700 people were added to Siemens last year, where those Siemens people or new hires?

A: A majority of those people where in my organization.  Some were services, some where direct or channel sales management and some were pre-sale technical support. Some came from Siemens but most came from the market or competitors.

Q: Helmuth, yesterday you talked about the adoption of Siemens PLM Software inside the rest of Siemens, is that all of Siemens or just Industry Automation?

A: The strategy is for the internal adoption to be across all of Siemens and this will be done on a step by step process.

And then a few live questions from the audience:

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Q: From Brad Holtz – is there a conversion required to move from Teamcenter Engineering or Teamcenter Enterprise to the Teamcenter unified architecture?

A: Steve – there are two sides.  Teamcenter Engineering customers have a seamless upgrade, essentially over a weekend if no customizations have been created. If there are customizations, we have a tool to run to look at them to see if there are custom item types that clash with what we are sending as standard in Teamcenter unified.  If you are a Teamcenter Enterprise user there are a number of options.  What most Teamcenter Enterprise users have chosen is co-existence where they keep their existing install and start new programs on the new architecture.

Q: From Ken Wong – I’s like to know about the history of Sync Tech?  Was it under development before the Siemens acquisition and what did Siemens add to it?

A: Chuck – yes, it was under development in the form of some advanced research and math development.  Siemens added the investment resources required to actually complete the development and commercialize it on a much faster timeline than we would have been able to do prior to the acquisition.

Q: Allen Berhens – you mentioned you were expanding Teamcenter into the document management space.  Do you se yourself competiting with EMC or IBM in that space?

A: Steve – we have a large base of users already doing document management in Teamcenter Enterprise, so the real expansion will be adding those capabilities (managing data at a granular level and publish in multiple languages) to the Teamcenter unified architecture with a more modern user interface.

Lot’s of good questions, lot’s of good answers.  Another great event comes to a close.  See you all next year in Boston.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/news/so-long-fare-well/