Please reconsider the new name for Integrity, "Windchill RV&S" means nothing

[LLawton]

Before it's too late, PTC should reconsider the new name for the Integrity LM product.

In the U.S. "RV" means Recreational Vehicle. So "Windchill RV&S" reads to me as "Windchill Recreational Vehicle and Stuff". I understand "S" is supposed to mean "Source", which is to say nothing. Source what?

I'm sorry to sound negative but I have to question what PTC is thinking here.

[happerly]

Many thanks for your feedback LLawton, I do appreciate all feedback, positive and negative. As you may know, we rebranded all of our Integrity family products to the Windchill brand back in June. This rebranding has already been implemented on ptc.com, in our product datasheets, marketing materials, etc. and is being applied to the products in their next appropriate releases. Windchill Process Director was released back in June, with Windchill RV&S and Windchill Modeler planned for early 2020. I am assuming from your feedback that your issue is not with the change to the Windchill brand per se, but with the ‘RV&S’ part, so let me take you through our thinking. The first constraint was that we could not use the name Windchill Lifecycle Manager, as the product does not manage the lifecycles of Windchill as a whole, so we needed to change the name. This RV&S acronym relates only to the software which is installed. The products which are included on our price list are; a) Windchill Requirements & Validation (which changed from PTC Requirements & Validation in June) and b) Windchill Source Code Management (which changed from PTC Global Software Development, also in June). We kept the R&V, while changing the ‘PTC’ to ‘Windchill’. As a global vendor we recognize that acronyms may have regional meanings, but I don’t think our customers will confuse our Windchill RV(&S) software product with a motor vehicle. Global Software Development didn’t make a lot of sense. Global was unnecessary as all of our products work for large global enterprises and it is not an IDE for software development but a tool for source code management and associated processes. So, we renamed this to Windchill Source Code Management. The next challenge was the name mapping from the purchasable products to the software you receive. As mentioned above, we could not use Lifecycle Manger. This name needed to combine Windchill R&V with Windchill SCM, the result being Windchill RV&S. I hope this helps clarify our thought process and the rebranding/renaming we implemented in June this year. Thanks again, Hedley

[LLawton]

Hello Hedley,

Thanks for taking the time to give me this reply and my apologies for only seeing it now.

Of course, I understand your thinking and the fact that it's too late now. I was hoping against hope...

Just so you know, almost 10 years after the MKS acquisition, I'm still battling long-time users who want to call the product "MKS", and newer users who want to call it "PTC" (I keep telling them that the difference between "PTC" and "Integrity" is the same as between "Microsoft" and "Excel" but to no avail). Lately, some have started writing/talking about "PTCI", and I don't know who started it.

The one unifying factor was "Integrity", but now a noun with a positive connotation has been taken away from me and replaced by an acronym that even includes a strange "&".

Hopefully this will be an opportunity for a reboot, or maybe we'll fall back into "PTC".

[JensN.]

I fully support the statements from @LLawton. Many users in our company still say MKS. The term "windchill" is already completely associated with our PLM system and RV&S is simply very cumbersome to pronounce for German tongues (no matter if with German or English pronunciation). So the people stay with nameing the tool either MKS or PTC, which is too generic. RVS is also associated with an old, outdated file transfer protocol and (unfortunately) jokes are made about the fact that the name was chosen because Integrity is as old and outdated as RVS. We're not happy with the new naming.

I think it would have been a better idea to name it Windchill Integrity or so, then you see the message that it is related to the whole Windchill family but it is still the old toolchain for lifecycle management and modeling.

kind regards, Jens

[happerly]

Many thanks for your feedback LLawton and Jens.  Please feel free to continue to use whatever names go down well inside your organizations. Product naming is never easy, particularly for successful products like Integrity Lifecycle Manager (MKS) and Integrity Modeler (Atego Modeler, Artisan Studio) which are used around the world.  We have to consider our customers in the Americas, Europe, Asia, etc. and all of the languages they use.  It is very hard to find names which don't have an unintended or negative connotation in at least one of the cultures or languages we support.  We do spend a lot of time on naming and try our best to appeal to as many of our stakeholders as possible.

In addition to the deep and productive integrations,  we are also making very good progress on the refreshing and updating of both products.  We are also adding some very useful new features.

Just to provide a quick update.  The process to change these names started in April last year and has been rolling out since then.  The ptc.com web site was updated in June and the development work on Integrity Lifecycle Manager started in July.  The first Integrity Lifecycle Manager release with the new name is actually tomorrow.  Windchill RV&S 12.3 will be available for download on ptc.com on Friday the 31st of January 2020.