Virtual Desktop Environments Coming to Creo Design Apps

Software maker PTC will offer a virtual desktop environment for its Creo product design applications, potentially freeing engineers to run them from remote desktops on a variety of operating systems and mobile devices.

"With virtualization, they can put Creo on a server and work anyplace where they have access to the Internet," Brian Thompson, vice president of CREO product management for PTC, told Design News at the PTC Live Global 2013 conference this week. "They don't need to be tied to a workstation."

The Creo product design software suite will offer the virtual desktop environment in five of its applications: Creo Parametric, Creo Direct, Creo Layout, Creo Options Modeler, and Creo Simulate. Starting with PTC Creo 2.0 M060, those applications will be supported by PTC when running on virtualized desktops on an IBM server.

The virtual strategy could give a productivity boost to designers, who often must get global teams up and running quickly in new locales. Virtualization of PTC Creo helps them do that simply by updating a single server. The company said the technology would enable design teams to work on huge assemblies stored on remote computers with little or no latency.

Thompson said the key to the strategy is the freedom it gives to design teams. "They can be in the middle of defining a feature and they can stop and pick it up later somewhere else, without ever missing a beat," he told us.

Related posts: