Parametric Technology Corporation
|
|
Parametric Technology Corporation (Nasdaq: PMTC) is a maker of mechanical computer-aided design, manufacturing, and engineering software including Pro/ENGINEER, Pro/Mechanica, Pro/Intralink, ICEM Surf, CADDS5, and Pro/Desktop.
Samuel Petrovich Geisberg previously worked at Prime Computer, ComputerVision (CV) and Applicon. Geisberg founded a new company, PTC, based on ideas that were in the first product Pro/Engineer. Geisberg saw that modelers in the 1985 were unable to easily modify the boundary representation (BREP) once it was written out. The solution to that problem was to regenerate the BREP from the constructive solid geometry (CSG) representation and its history using ideas that later on became a part of the Associative engine. This approach gave rise to hybrid modelers which would save both the CSG and BREP and allow a user to regenerate the BREP from the feature history captured in the change state.
The other advantage of PTC was to have a product build in the market leading UNIX platforms. The management at Prime and ComputerVision thought that they had users deeply investment in its workstations and having all of their engineering data in proprietary formats but not seeing that the days of PrimOS were numbered.
Once an initial version of Pro/E was developed and the company received venture capital funding from Charles River Associates, Steve Walsky became the CEO.
This approach was extremely financially successful and caused a major paradigm shift in the CAD/CAM industry. The first response in the market place was a merger of Prime and ComputerVision. Unfortunately, unable to react quickly enough to parametric feature based modeling, unable to raise enough revenue from their new product line, and plagued with internal data translation problems created by internally translating from CV representation to Prime presentation, the merged company, CV, was bought out by PTC as well.
External links
Parametric Technology Corporation (http://www.ptc.com)