At its annual Solid Edge users conference, parent company UGS an-nounced a name change and a CAD-interoperability road map.
The company had launched a campaign in March to change its name from Unigraphics Solutions to UGS, with a new logo of crossed rectangles. But in May, EDS (Plano, TX) announced it had acquired UGS and SDRC and would combine them into a fifth line of business, called "PLM Solutions," worth $1 billion. (The other four lines are: A.T. Kearney, Business Process Management, E Solutions, and Information Solutions.)
Now the challenge is finding interoperability between the group's high-end CAD products; Unigraphics and I-DEAS.
No problem, says Chuck Grindstaff, president of PLM products for EDS' PLM Solutions. The two applications should merge into a hybrid code named UGMS, for Unigraphics-Master Series. He estimated they would reach this goal in 18 months (April, 2003), at the juncture of I-DEAS 11 and Unigraphics 20.
In the meantime, they'll provide interoperability between Unigraphics and I-DEAS with the same technology currently used to link Unigraphics and Solid Edge. "We still expect heterogenous applications (customers with both platforms)," Grindstaff says. "The goal here is to make either customer base comfortable with the merged product."
For more information about PLM Solutions from EDS: Enter 539
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