ADSK: Autodesk and PTC (NASDAQ: PMTC) Announce Interoperability Agreement

Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) and PTC (NASDAQ: PMTC) today announced a technology exchange agreement to expand interoperability options for their customers and the manufacturing industry. This agreement brings together two software leaders with the common goal of facilitating software interoperability for organizations with multi-CAD environments.

Today's manufacturers are under increased pressure to get high quality products to market faster, with increased efficiencies and lower costs to the consumer. As part of this effort, many have adopted a multi-CAD strategy, either internally between departments or externally with partners and supply chains. This interoperability agreement aims to decrease the overall effort and costs that are commonly associated with supporting these environments. Autodesk and PTC plan to provide customers with out-of-the-box integrations between their solutions that will enable organizations to work more efficiently with the product development strategies currently in place and the flexibility to adopt future strategies.

"Interoperability continues to be a major challenge in manufacturing sectors including aerospace, automotive, high technology and industrial machinery," said Robert "Buzz" Kross, vice president of Manufacturing Solutions at Autodesk. "We understand that our customers use a mix of products in their workflow and providing them with the flexibility they need to get their jobs done is our priority."

"PTC recognizes that manufacturers manage complex business processes which often include heterogeneous design environments," said Brian Shepherd, divisional vice president, product management at PTC. "We have chosen to continue our focus on eliminating interoperability challenges so that customers can place greater attention on the true value-added activities of product development."

This agreement enables PTC to leverage Autodesk's RealDWG™ software development toolkit and deliver solutions using Autodesk's DWG™ technology, so that PTC's solutions will be interoperable with Autodesk® Inventor™ 3D software for the manufacturing industry and AutoCAD® software. Similarly, Autodesk can utilize PTC's GRANITE® 3D modeling and interoperability kernel to provide enhanced integration with Pro/ENGINEER®, PTC's integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software.


About PTC

PTC 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. PTC is included in the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit http://www.ptc.com/