Yes Bukaj, you are right in regards the Job Manager licensing...
As I said before, I believe PTC had lots of innovation in their product
back 10-15 years ago... they were one of the first companies to research
HSM toolpaths and they have patents about it... but today, what they got
is outdated... looks like everybody else improved and re-designed their
HSM algorithms and Pro/NC ones are now a baby in his first weeks... PTC as
the great marketer it is, still advertising about their 11 old HSM
technology and its patents... what a lot of tosh... there is no
status-quo in technology gentleman...
HSMWorks, a Danish CAM Integrator for Solidworks created a few years ago
a new HSM kernel written from zero, with extensive support 4/8 cores
very well... they designed the software in a partnership with HP back
then... the nice thing on this piece of software is that they have a
distributed CAM services manager which you can install on one or more
PC's on your local area network to enable automatic distribution of CAM
calculations (Even the secretary's machine), and when these machines are
idle or making a low usage of the processor (Like editing a doc in
MS-Word) your HSMWorks seat will search for machines running this
service and distribute the computation of the job for you.
This is a great deal of innovation, because even with everybody else
adding multi-core support on their CAM systems these days, these Danes
went a step ahead and added something that made them unique so far. In
my humble opinion, PTC is not a CAM leader anymore. At the best, they
are followers. You don't see PTC putting things before other companies.
They use to put it years after someone in the market because we push
them to do it... not to mention the time PTC used to charge customers to
develop stuff, like custom cycle functionality... there is not room for
these practices anymore...
Last year Delcam passed PTC in CAM revenues according to CIMData... that
was the first time in years that it happened... 2011, it will be even
harder for the CAM revenue leaders... (and great for us, customers) the
CAM market is boiling... U.S. has a MFG crisis and companies will look
for new systems to be more productive and extract all the potential of
their machines, otherwise they will close their doors and new doors will
be opened in China... it's a matter of survival now, small/medium
companies like Solidcam, HSMWorks, Delcam, OpenMind Tech are re-writing
the future of CAM... Siemens PLM and Dassault are also doing their
homework... so I believe the market will say... how it is possible that
PTC still linearizing helix entry in Volume machining or generating
thousands of tiny points in a ramp move? Their toolpaths are outdated
and do not reflect the reality of the modern CNC controls...
I find Pro/NC a robust product and very capable, and with
functionalities like those shown in the automation webcast David
suggested, you can make very nice things... but it's not easy to
implement those things in a global level when engineers are working from
UK, USA, Singapore, Norway, Brazil, all them connected via Windchill
technology... every site has their own machines and methods, people, so
I can put a great deal of automation in a MUDF and extract this as
annotation features, but perhaps my colleague in UK will not like the
tool set and speeds&feeds I used, or he can't use that on his
machines... so it's great, but hard to fully apply on big companies...
requires lots of discipline and seamless integration with engineering
practices.
The good thing is that PTC bought NCGraphics some years ago and the guy
in charge of Pro/NC today was the product manager of Pro/Toolmaker.. so
he knows this thing inside out... the good thing about this acquisition
is that NCGraphics technology is licensed in many products in the
industry, like Mastercam, Depocam, Visi... so these guys knows what
needs to be (re)done... we are eager to see this technology inside
Pro/NC, and that hopefully PTC can re-write their 20 years old code
using modern programming tools focusing in the 64 bits hardware and true
multi-core support (without charging you for an extra license like
today).
I'm not sure if PTC will be able to break this repetitive cycle of not
being able to deliver fast paced innovation in CAM... I don't know how
much attention (Read money for R&D) CAM gets from the big fishes at PTC
or if they are really prepared to fight in this modern CAM market, but
I'm hopeful that CREO will also bring integrated CAM companies to
develop for PTC plattaform, and if Pro/NC do not evolve as we need it to
do, then we can get fast, fancy and powerful CAM systems to run inside
our CAD platform: Pro/E (Creo). One way or another, the market will
dictate PTC future, and it's up to them to do their homework with Creo.
Anyway, in big engineering environments like ours, it's important to
work with PTC to make the software better and to keep it as our global
solution, because of the many benefits of the full associativity with
the CAD model. And that's why I believe PTC deserves a last opportunity
to revamp Pro/NC, because PTC software as a whole also brought us many
good moments in our history.
JM2C
Daniel
