PTC's Relex Acquisition Fleshes out Product Analytics Strategy

PTC has filled in anotherpiece in its strategy to build out a new family of product analyticsapplications with its acquisition of RelexSoftware Corp., a 50-person, 20-plus year provider of software used toanalyze product reliability and safety.

The Relex software suite will find a home within PTC'sInSight brand, an emerging family of analysis tools aimed at helping engineersget earlier visibility into criteria about their product designs that mightaffect overall performance, according to Andrew Wertkin, PTC's director ofproducts. The Relex acquisition comes on the heels of the December 2008acquisition of Synapsis,which delivered a rules-based engine and architecture for analyzing productdata in addition to a patented solution for tracking product compliance at thesubstance, material and part levels. The Synapsis technology will provide thecore foundation for building out the product analytics line, Wertkin says,which in addition to compliance and quality and safety analytics is likely toinclude modules for evaluating such factors as cost.

"We want to help engineers analyze a product along a varietyof different criteria, providing a dashboard, tradeoff analysis-type view," he says. "This will help them in the decision-making process by doing product analytics asearly on as possible. Different than business intelligence, which usually looksbackwards, we want to take historical data, new data, predictive data scoresand dashboards and examine products well before they're built."

The Relex tools help engineers gain early insight intopotential risk and reliability issues, predict reliability performance andtrack reliability against targets throughout the development stage. Thesoftware has 11 modules covering such areas as fault tree analysis, failuremode effects analysis as well as closed-loop field performance analysis.

Initially, PTC will continue to sell Relex through thecompany's existing channels, but Wertkin says the company is evaluating how tobest meld its capabilities with the Synapsis technology and future extensionsto the InSight line going forward. He says to expect to see PTC deliver additionalInSight analytics products over the next couple of quarters.

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