Agree to Integrate

NEEDHAM, Mass. and PALO ALTO, Calif.  February 12, 2002  PTC, The Product Development Company, and TIBCO Software Inc., today announced a global strategic alliance in which TIBCO Software will be the preferred provider of pre-packaged business integration solutions for PTC's line of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. TIBCO's products will serve as the integration platform to link PTC's solutions with enterprise systems.

AMR Research reports, "PTC is partnering with TIBCO for direct, prebuilt integration links from Windchill to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems from SAP, Oracle, and J.D. Edwards ... The meaningful progress here is in PTC's continued movement toward a wider understanding of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) ... Integration is the first step, and TIBCO is all about integration."  

The joint solution optimizes and automates business processes and streamlines operational efficiencies by facilitating two-way communication between PTC's Windchill technology and other business systems. This closed loop integration allows a company to send an engineering bill of material, with all its rich product data, into the production environment for manufacturing and distribution activities. At the same time, manufacturing and cost information is made visible to Engineering and Product Development to make better product design decisions which reduce cost and result in faster time-to-market.
 
"Based on speed, reliability, and ease of integration, TIBCO's enterprise application integration technology was an excellent choice for PTC to implement as an integration backbone for our new generation of Product Lifecycle Management solutions," said James Heppelmann, executive vice president software solutions and chief technology officer at PTC. "By teaming with TIBCO, PTC can focus on its core competency -- product development -- while leveraging TIBCO's integration solutions to deliver efficiencies in design and manufacturing processes for our customers, efficiencies that will reduce design time and help bring better products to market more quickly."