NEEDHAM, MA. - October 18, 2006 - PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today announced it has acquired ITEDO Software GmbH and ITEDO Software LLC (collectively, ITEDO), headquartered in Germany, for approximately $17 million in cash. With its market-leading IsoDraw family of products, ITEDO delivers comprehensive software solutions for creating and maintaining technical illustrations. ITEDO has more than 2,400 customers in multiple discrete manufacturing vertical markets such as automotive, aerospace and defense, and industrial equipment. With this acquisition, PTC will be the only vendor to offer a complete solution for creating, managing, and publishing text and graphical content for technical publications.
ITEDO’s IsoDraw® and related products IsoView® and IsoCompose® are special-purpose technical illustration solutions, optimized for the process of creating isometric technical illustrations for manufacturing, marketing, customer service, and support documentation. Illustrations can be created from scratch and from legacy illustrations, but more importantly they can be derived quickly from existing 3D and 2D design data, including all major mechanical CAD applications. IsoDraw enables users to leverage the rich content that resides in the engineering department in a way that is relevant to consumers of technical publications.
“Manufactured products are not complete without the accompanying illustrated documentation,” said Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer of PTC. “Many manufacturing customers rely upon the delivery of documentation for product launches, revenue recognition, regulatory compliance, service delivery and customer satisfaction. By adding IsoDraw to our Product Development System, we will be able to provide customers with the missing link between engineering and technical publications and help our customers improve time-to-market, documentation quality and cost, and overall customer satisfaction.”
ITEDO solutions will become an important part of PTC’s Arbortext® product family, providing extensive 2D technical illustration capabilities today and further enhancing PTC’s 3D interactive content for technical publications in the future. Combining ITEDO’s capabilities in 2D isometric drawing and technical illustration with PTC’s expertise in 3D CAD and associative content will provide a powerful, end-to-end solution for 2D and 3D graphics within technical publications.
“Today, the creation of technical illustrations is mainly a manual process that involves redrawing graphics from scratch,” said Dieter Weidenbrück, founder and chief executive officer of ITEDO. “Additionally, many technical illustrators do not have a repository for the thousands of graphics they create. This means many companies often recreate content instead of reusing it. The integration of ITEDO and PTC solutions will enable companies to create highly configured and current versions of documentation earlier in the product or service development process, while eliminating the duplication of work inherent in the process today.”
By complementing and extending the PTC Product Development System with ITEDO products, PTC will be able to provide customers with the ability to use Pro/ENGINEER® information as the basis for technical illustrations, with automatic updates to the illustrations as changes are made to the upstream CAD models. Windchill®, in turn, offers the ability to store all 2D and 3D graphic content as well as XML-based textual instructions in a centrally located content management system. Illustrations and text can then be reused and repurposed for many different publications and formats that are dynamically assembled to meet the needs of different audiences.
“This acquisition will substantially expand the usefulness of 2D and 3D CAD data developed by engineers with PTC's Pro/ENGINEER and other vendors’ product design applications,” said Gisela D. Wilson, director of the Product, Project and Portfolio Management Solutions Program at market research firm IDC. “Manufacturing companies have struggled for years with the disconnect between engineers and downstream users of technical illustrations in manufacturing, marketing and customer service. PTC's launch into technical publications, through its acquisition first of Arbortext and now of ITEDO, paves the way to a new level of automation by extending the concept of associativity from product development into dynamic publishing of both text and illustrations.”
PTC and ITEDO share about 600 customers. One joint customer is Ingersoll Rand Road Development, a leading global supplier of quality equipment and services to the road building, road maintenance and general construction markets. “Each product we deliver to market requires assembly instructions, operation/maintenance manuals, and parts catalogs,” said Gary Weller, supervisor of technical illustration, Ingersoll Rand Road Development. “We typically have little lead time to prepare the hundreds of illustrations that are required to support each product launch. Additionally, our newer designs have been created with Pro/ENGINEER, but some legacy and supplier designs are in other CAD formats. Fortunately, with ITEDO products, we are able to quickly derive technical illustrations from all of these CAD files, and we have realized a ten-fold increase in productivity from our prior manual process. We are pleased that PTC has recognized the importance of technical illustrations through its acquisition of ITEDO, who is on the leading edge of innovation and standards development in the world of technical illustration.”
George Ashley, director, engineering technology, Ingersoll Rand added, “As a long-time customer of both PTC and ITEDO solutions, we are excited about the steps PTC has taken to deliver on its vision for integrated product development and technical publications solutions. This is a significant challenge for all discrete manufacturing companies; clearly PTC has listened to its customers on this issue. The combination of IsoDraw, Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill and Arbortext within a single Product Development System is quite compelling in both its capabilities and system architecture.”
Customers will continue to be able to leverage all ITEDO products, including IsoDraw, IsoView and IsoCompose, as stand-alone solutions or as an integral part of PTC’s Product Development System. Like ITEDO, PTC is committed to openness and support for heterogeneous deployments. Customers with multi-CAD environments or those who use CAD solutions other than Pro/ENGINEER will still be able to take advantage of IsoDraw’s unique ability to derive technical illustrations from the CAD model and maintain the illustrations. Additionally, PTC will continue to support a variety of standard graphics file formats to enable customers to create technical illustrations that are compliant with important international standards for technical publications such as WebCGM, Airline Transport Association (ATA) specifications and S1000D.
About ITEDO Software GmbH and LLC
ITEDO Software is specialized in the development and sales of software solutions for technical illustration. Best known for their market-leading product, IsoDraw, ITEDO has revolutionized the process of creating and maintaining isometric technical illustrations. The privately held company was founded in Hennef, Germany in 1990. Today ITEDO has 34 employees mainly in Germany and the United States. For more information, please visit http://www.itedo.com/.
About PTC
PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 50,000 companies worldwide. PTC customers include the world's most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries. PTC is included in the S&P Midcap 400 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit http://www.ptc.com.
Statements in this press release that are not historic facts, including statements about expanding PTC’s addressable markets through the acquisition of ITEDO, the future integration and support of PTC and ITEDO products, and growth in the technical publications market, are forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. Those risks and uncertainties include the following: we may be unable to successfully develop the technology necessary to integrate ITEDO’s products with PTC products; the market for, and customer adoption of, technical publication and illustration solutions may not grow as quickly as we expect; we may be unable to retain and maintain relationships with key employees, distributors, customers and other strategic partners of ITEDO, including those within markets and vertical industries with which PTC has little experience; we may be unable to adequately support multiple solutions across heterogeneous environments acquired through strategic business development initiatives in industries outside of PTC’s traditional customer base; we may be unable to efficiently integrate acquired businesses to achieve the revenue and earnings we expect from those acquisitions while ensuring that adequate resources continue to be focused on our core businesses in order to drive organic growth as well as other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in reports filed by PTC with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including PTC’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q.
PTC and its logo, The Product Development Company, Pro/ENGINEER, Windchill, Arbortext, ITEDO, IsoDraw, IsoView, IsoCompose and all PTC product names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Parametric Technology Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and in other countries.
About Single-Sourcing Solutions
Single-Sourcing Solutions is an expert in the PTC Arbortext product suite. Because of our deep experience with the Arbortext toolset and in the practical development and deployment of mission-critical, custom XML development, Single-Sourcing Solutions has the expertise required for successful dynamic information delivery. Single-Sourcing Solutions is active in the global Arbortext community and related information development communities.
For more information on Single-Sourcing Solutions, please visit https://www.single-sourcing.com.
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