Coray is the Director of GSI Partner Marketing at PTC, based in London, UK. She has led Analyst Relations and Corporate Communications within PTC’s marketing organization. Prior to PTC, Coray ran Industry Relations at CRM startup Creatio, overseeing investor, analyst, and PR engagement. She began her career in financial services as an equity sales trader at Needham & Co. in New York, covering Industrials, including PTC, from an investment perspective.
The product has changed. The system of record underneath it mostly hasn't.
A quiet structural change is working its way through every engineering-led industry at once. Vehicles, medical devices, aircraft, and industrial equipment are all becoming software-defined - their differentiation, their safety behavior, and increasingly their business models now live in code that keeps changing long after the hardware ships. Analysts have called this the defining shift of the decade, and the boardroom has largely accepted it. The engineering systems that have to carry it are a different story.
At the center of those systems sits requirements and application lifecycle management: the connective tissue between what a product is supposed to do, the software and hardware that make it do that, and the evidence that proves it is safe and compliant. That layer was standardized in most organizations during a hardware era, when requirements were written early, revised occasionally, and handed downstream in documents. The products it now has to describe change weekly, span multiple engineering disciplines, and answer to more than one regulator at the same time.
Three forces are converging on the requirements layer
What makes this an inflection point rather than a routine upgrade cycle is that several pressures are arriving together, across sectors that rarely share a root cause.
Architectural consolidation
Products are collapsing from dozens of isolated controllers toward a handful of centralized, high-performance compute platforms. That concentration raises the stakes on every requirement and every interface, because a single platform now carries functions that used to be physically separated. Requirements, variants, and tests have to be managed as one connected system, not as a filing cabinet of documents per subsystem.
Regulatory intensification
The compliance bar is rising in parallel across industries. ASPICE and ISO 26262 in automotive, IEC 62304 in medical devices, DO-178C in aerospace, and newer regimes such as ISO 21434 for cybersecurity and SOTIF for safety of the intended function all demand the same underlying thing: an unbroken, current chain of evidence from every requirement to every release. Regulators increasingly expect that chain to be live, not reconstructed in the weeks before an assessment.
AI raising the value of connected data
AI is now entering engineering workflows in earnest, and its value is directly proportional to how connected and well-structured the underlying data is. A recent IDC Spotlight paper sponsored by HCLTech quantifies the gap: manufacturing leaders see a 16% late-stage design change rate, while midfield peers sit at 47%, and 77% of manufacturers now rate AI agents for data integration as very or extremely important. The organizations pulling ahead are the ones whose requirements and lifecycle data are coherent enough for AI to reason over.
Powering SDP with AI-Augmented Digital Threads
IDC Spotlight paper, sponsored by HCLTech: 77% of manufacturers say AI agents for data integration are critical. See what separates leaders from midfield peers.
Read the White PaperWhere the market is heading: from document control to a living digital thread
The direction of travel is consistent across the leading engineering organizations we work with. They are moving requirements, tests, and code onto a common, connected foundation where traceability is captured as engineering happens and audit history accumulates natively. In that model, compliance evidence is produced continuously by the way people work, change impact is visible before approval, and safety and cybersecurity cases build alongside the engineering rather than trailing it. PTC's latest ALM releases - Codebeamer 3.3 and Codebeamer AI 1.2, with Delta Merge across variants, deeper Windchill digital-thread integration, and governed AI search - are built explicitly for that living-thread model.
New: Codebeamer 3.3 & Codebeamer AI 1.2
PTC's latest ALM release adds Delta Merge, deeper Windchill integration, and AI search.
Read the NewsThe obstacle is rarely conviction. Most engineering leaders already know where they need to be. The hard part is getting there from decades of accumulated requirements data, embedded processes, and in-flight programs that cannot pause for a tool transition. That migration problem - not the vision - is where modernization efforts stall.
How PTC and HCLTech close the gap
Software Defined Product Acceleration, SDPA, is the joint answer HCLTech and PTC built for exactly that migration problem. It pairs the destination platform - PTC Codebeamer, an ALM system purpose-built for regulated, safety-critical development, with Windchill connecting requirements to the broader product lifecycle - with the migration engineering discipline to reach it at enterprise scale.
SDPA runs as one accountable programme across four stages: a current-state assessment and migration roadmap; migration and transformation using HCLTech's SwiftX and SwiftX.AI accelerators and Process Automation Kit, with industry-specific templates; phased rollout and adoption with CI/CD, change management, and training; and steady-state managed services. The accelerators use configurable mapping rules to automate transformation while preserving 100% of attributes and module hierarchy, replacing custom scripting with pre-built process templates and compressing tool setup from months to days.
One pattern, many industries
The same modernization path applies wherever requirements and compliance have outgrown document-based tooling. PTC Codebeamer recently replaced a legacy ALM system and paper-based processes at Hamilton Medical, a global leader in intelligent mechanical ventilation, strengthening collaboration, traceability, and audit preparedness in a medical-device context governed by IEC 62304 - the same connected-thread outcome that automotive and aerospace programs are pursuing under their own standards.
Accelerating Customer Value Through Co-Innovation
See how HCLTech and PTC help manufacturers accelerate software-defined product development through joint innovation, engineering expertise, and solution-led transformation.
Read the Blog
Evidence this works at production scale
The proof points behind SDPA come from delivery, not slideware. HCLTech and PTC have modernized requirements management for organizations across Europe and beyond, with more than 230 Codebeamer consultants across Europe, the US, Japan, and India, over 100 man-years of ASPICE experience including certified Provisional Assessors, and a partnership spanning more than two decades. In a single programme for an OEM in Germany, the joint team unified legacy requirements spread across multiple divisions - with complex integration into PLM, JIRA, and test management - into one enterprise environment, migrating more than 500,000 requirements items with end-to-end traceability intact. A separate European program consolidated legacy Polarion and DOORS Classic environments into Codebeamer while managing change carefully enough to protect user adoption. Across engagements, HCLTech's accelerators have cut migration rework by 48% and saved roughly 20 weeks per project per year.
The question worth putting on the roadmap
Software-defined products move at the speed of the engineering data behind them, and that data is only as useful as the system that keeps it connected and current. For engineering leaders, the strategic question for the next planning cycle is whether their requirements foundation can carry a product that never stops changing, under compliance expectations that keep tightening, across a supplier and program landscape that keeps growing more complex. SDPA exists to help organizations answer that question with a modern foundation - and to get there without stopping the programs already in motion.
From Modernization Vision to Execution
"Engineering leaders understand the importance of a connected digital thread, but modernization efforts often stall when organizations must balance transformation with active product programs. By combining PTC's Codebeamer and Windchill capabilities with HCLTech's migration expertise and accelerators, SDPA helps organizations modernize requirements management, improve traceability, and accelerate adoption without disrupting ongoing innovation."
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