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PTC's Relex Acquisition Fleshes out Product Analytics Strategy
Newest addition to InSight line helps companies analyze product reliability, quality and safety
Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor -- Design News, June 16, 2009
PTC has filled in another piece in its strategy to build out a new family of product analytics applications with its acquisition of Relex Software Corp., a 50-person, 20-plus year provider of software used to analyze product reliability and safety.
The Relex software suite will find a home within PTC's InSight brand, an emerging family of analysis tools aimed at helping engineers get earlier visibility into criteria about their product designs that might affect overall performance, according to Andrew Wertkin, PTC's director of products. The Relex acquisition comes on the heels of the December 2008 acquisition of Synapsis, which delivered a rules-based engine and architecture for analyzing product data in addition to a patented solution for tracking product compliance at the substance, material and part levels. The Synapsis technology will provide the core foundation for building out the product analytics line, Wertkin says, which in addition to compliance and quality and safety analytics is likely to include modules for evaluating such factors as cost.
"We want to help engineers analyze a product along a variety of different criteria, providing a dashboard, tradeoff analysis-type view," he says. "This will help them in the decision-making process by doing product analytics as early on as possible. Different than business intelligence, which usually looks backwards, we want to take historical data, new data, predictive data scores and dashboards and examine products well before they're built."
The Relex tools help engineers gain early insight into potential risk and reliability issues, predict reliability performance and track reliability against targets throughout the development stage. The software has 11 modules covering such areas as fault tree analysis, failure mode effects analysis as well as closed-loop field performance analysis.
Initially, PTC will continue to sell Relex through the company's existing channels, but Wertkin says the company is evaluating how to best meld its capabilities with the Synapsis technology and future extensions to the InSight line going forward. He says to expect to see PTC deliver additional InSight analytics products over the next couple of quarters.
The PTC Relex dashboard provides graphical views of key reliability, quality and safety metrics.
