UGS pulls in TCNO

One of the areas of PLM that I have been following "Digital Manufacturing" pertains to the connection between a designer's intent and the actual manufacturing of a product (and simulating the manufacturing of a product prior to actual line/control logic and mfg asset deployment). This is seeing increasing interest on the part of both end users and suppliers of PLM software. Leading players Dassault and UGS are increasingly focusing on this area. Dassault, with its Delmia suite has been the leader and Tecnomatix and UGS have been working together through a strategic partnership for the last several years.

UGS, with this acquistion, will now be able to more aggressively build-out the integration between their respective platforms and allow UGS to better compete with its number one foe in PLM, Dassault. This also insures that no other vendor would swoop in and out-flank UGS by acquiring Tecnomatix, which would be quite a blow to their developing efforts in this space.

A couple of questions remain: What will UGS do with the recently acquired MES business, US Data that TCNO previously acquired. There willl be some challenges here in pulling an MES solution into the realm of Digital Mfg - something that TCNO was struggling with and forsee the same problems for UGS. Also, TCNO was the first supplier to develop a techniqueto model/simulate control logic and then automatically download such logic into PLC controllers (something they developed with Siemens to serve the automotive industry). TCNO has been extremely slow to capitalize on this technology and Dassault has captured the market's attention with its own solution, called Delmia Automation. Hopefully, UGS will see the little gem they have here and further build out its capabilities, otherwise they will just be playing catch-up to Dassault, who honestly has a far grander vision of PLM then UGS has demonstrated to date.