Partnership expands options for CAD interoperability in manufacturing industries

Autodesk and PTC have 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 organisations 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 organisations 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 recognises 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 RealDWGTM software development toolkit and deliver solutions using Autodesk's DWGTM technology, so that PTC's solutions will be interoperable with Autodesk InventorTM 3D software for the manufacturing industry and AutoCAD software.  Similarly, Autodesk can utilise PTC's GRANITE 3D modelling and interoperability kernel to provide enhanced integration with Pro/ENGINEER, PTC's integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software.