Introducing Creo+: PTC’s Newest Software as a Service CAD Solution

00:00 Welcome to the end of really the first day here at Liveworks of some hopefully exciting content. We are going to base on an extension of what we heard in Jim Heppelmann presentation this morning. Certainly Paul and Brian Thompson's presentation just I guess an hour ago in this session, we'll focus solely on the deep dive of Creole Plus and the the journey, in essence, that we hope you will join us in, continue to certainly benefits from the capabilities of Creole,

00:33 but the plus offerings that come through the SaaS offering. My name is Marc Fisher, senior director here at PTC in the product management team. I'm accompanied by Niall, a product manager on the CAD team as well. Over the next, I'd say 25 minutes, I'd like to give you, as I said, a deep dive into Creole plus talking a little bit about the benefits and capabilities that are available today and then kind of give you a preview of that journey that I mentioned and what will come out in

01:05 the coming quarters and certainly in the coming years. We're at an interesting point in time in that , you know, as Jim mentioned, you know, how do we help drive this digital transformation? And Jim talked a lot about the growth and the drive to SaaS and really leveraging the backbone, the SaaS backbone platform that we've introduced. You know, I talk about the plus offerings in this case Creole Plus,

01:35 but there's also solutions plus offerings of our other flagship products, and they're all going to be built on the Atlas platform and really providing the ability for you to harness that capability and how that can be used to transform how you design your products. As I said, we'll introduce what is available today, and we've focused solely on the ability to administer your products. You know, for those administrators and administrators in the room, how can you benefit from Creole Plus?

02:07 But we've also looked at introducing new collaboration tools. And I think you saw a little bit of that this morning in Jim's presentation around how you can effectively collaborate with your peers on the evolution of the particular assembly that you might be working on. So for us, this is a journey. This is a start. What we have today will be very different tomorrow because we are continuing to enhance the SaaS offerings with new services and capabilities that you will take advantage of

02:38 as it's deployed to your end users. But before we jump into what are what is that journey, what are the capabilities today, it's probably worth to reiterate what Jim mentioned this morning. What's the benefit of Creole Plus? What's the benefit of SaaS? How do I take advantage of it? Is that going to be an advantage for my company, for my users, in designing your products? And so putting Creole aside, putting windchill aside,

03:08 you know, we could do a Google search on the benefits of SaaS. And and typically you see these capabilities that are presented where we talk about availability, mobility, the ability to make it available to your end users without the needs of going through downloading media, a CD image, for example, or installing a license server to manage your licenses. You know, how do I make it easily accessible for my users today as a thick client? But tomorrow as a streaming offering.

03:40 So again, availability, mobility, the ability to use it anywhere is key. We are conscious of the cost of running applications in your business. Whether it's Korea or other. And obviously the challenge is you as an organization, as your companies are aware of, how can we drive those costs down Both, let's say the cost of the application. But also the hidden costs of running an application, you know,

04:10 the administrative costs, the security costs and so forth. And through our plus offering, in this case Creole Plus. That is our goal. We want to lower the total cost of ownership. You know, certainly from a security or scalability, you know, your environment changes and the applications that you use should be able to change with you and effectively update and make it scale to the needs of your users. You know, we talk about acceleration of innovation, you know, PTC, and I'm happy to see a lot of our developers here

04:42 and being able to sit side by side with you as as our users. You know, they're developing, they're enhancing the product. You know, we just released ten. We're starting working on Creo 11. And next year, Creo 11 will be out in the market. It will introduce new innovation, new capabilities. But the value of those capabilities is only exposed if you upgrade to those given releases. And we know for a fact that a lot of customers may not move every year

05:13 and they go through a process to do that upgrade with Creo plus, that burden is gone. As Jim mentioned earlier, you're always on the latest release, which means in turn, you always get access to the latest capabilities that the development team that we at PTC are introducing. So being able to harness that, being able to leverage that in how you design your products. We don't work in a silo. We understand users collaborate with one another. Whether they do that today with windshield through a ad hoc collaborative session.

05:47 You know, we want to solve that challenge. We want you as users to work together in real time, understand what one change is going to do as it relates to another, how we're able to see those those changes happen in real time and be synchronized to everyone's machine. And again, with the backbone of Atlas and the SaaS platform, we're able to bring collaboration to the market. And again, you saw that this morning in Jim's keynote. At the end of the day, we want to improve your usability, provide a better solution for you, but that also includes new adoption Aids.

06:21 How do I learn the product If I have a problem, how do I solve that problem? How do I get back to being productive in the tool? So again, SaaS provides the catalyst to make that happen. So these are the benefits, not necessarily specific to Korea, but we're harnessing them as we implement today and in tomorrow the plus offerings of our solution. But let's take a look specifically at Creoles.

06:53 Creole Plus is Creole at the end of the day. The plus is just significant or signifies the connection to SAS, connection to the Atlas platform, the ability to leverage certainly the benefits that I just mentioned that SAS provides. But Creole is Creole at the end of the day. So the breadth of capabilities that Creole ten offers will now be exposed in the Creole Plus offering. So the, the power, the proven functionality, the the experience that your users deal with today in on Prem Creole,

07:26 that will be the similar environment that they'll use in Creole plus. Where the big difference is, and again, I've kind of alluded to it, is the connection to the services that are offered in the SaaS platform. But again, let's clear it here. Creole is Creole. Creole Plus provides the breadth of capabilities that an on prem user will experience with Creole. Okay. I will state and I'll state this clear to begin with, you know, our journey to plus and our journey to SaaS does not mean that our

07:59 on prem offering of Creole is going away. In fact, it will continue to be available today, tomorrow and in the future. But our hope is that customers, you all see value in what the SaaS offering is able to provide and the additional benefits that are not available with on prem that you'll be able to harness and take advantage of that. So from that perspective, there is no data. Translation Korea, Korea, as I mentioned. So the data that your legacy, the data you're creating today and on prem will be able to be retrieved in Korea.

08:32 Plus without any conversion, without any problems, it's frankly no different going from a Creole four to a Creo seven, everything is upwards compatible. Okay, that's no different in moving to Creo plus again, identical core capabilities plus obviously the additional SaaS capabilities that that I mentioned. We do have a tight integration with windchill. We want you to obviously connect to windchill, whether that happens to be windchill plus. Or it happens to be on prem windshield.

09:03 You've got to manage your data. You've got to store your data, manage it through the life cycle. Career plus will certainly be able to retrieve that. But the big thing is, as I said, this is a journey. What I will present as far as capabilities today with Creo plus, we're continuing to evolve that new services, new capabilities that will be coming out in the coming quarters, in the coming years that will really continue to evolve the capabilities on how you manage, administer, and certainly leverage Korea. Okay.

09:33 The way I would boil it down, there's two key areas that we focused on for Creolus. The first is from an administrative perspective. And that we're offering through what we call the PTC Control center. So the control center is really broken up into two areas. I as an admin, I'm going to access the the portal in Atlas through the again, the plus admin portal where I'll start to centrally administer my whole company,

10:03 whether it's one office, whether it's many offices spread across a given country or across multiple countries around the world, I will be able to administer that from my location, from a browser and be able to control that effectively. So this is where now I as an admin can start to add my users because I have an organization for my company in Atlas, I'll call it Mark Fisher for argument's sake. I now can start to add you as registered users into that environment we can also

10:38 connect to. So for single sign on, so we can leverage the same username and password you use today in your company. We'll be able to use that as we authenticate into the organization. Once I add users now I can start to assign them entitlements where we can Now look at are you an everyday user? Well, if that's the case, I'm going to assign you an entitlement and that's yours for the duration of your usage of the product. Or if you're a user that may use it once or twice a week, once or twice a month,

11:09 whatever, We can now assign a shared entitlement for you to be able to leverage that. But the goal is I'm going to assign those entitlements based on you being introduced in the organization, and then I'm going to group you into specific profiles. Are you engineering, are you manufacturing, are you simulation? And that will then govern the types of configurations, config dot, pro sub templates and so forth that may be governed for engineering versus manufacturing. But then the big piece is Korea will automatically be deployed to your machine

11:40 again today. It's a thick client, but it's going to be deployed based on the entitlements that you as a user have been given by your admin. So again, that's central administration is key to really getting creo creo plus into the hands of the users. So we talk about packaging and we have users and we analyzed how you as users leverage Creole. Do we take our current licensing model that we have for on prem and convert it into a SaaS offering? And the answer is no,

12:10 because it's not really efficient towards the use of licensing or packaging for for users in a SaaS environment. We analyzed performance advisor data to determine that there is a good number of frequent users use product every day. They they start. Up in the morning, grab a license. End of the day and release the license frequent users, but they also need access to specific modules based on their role

12:40 and certainly their responsibility. We also say that there are infrequent users and I would define those as, again, use it once a week, twice a week, once a month, what have you. They're not in there all the time. They need it when they need it and move on, obviously. So what we've done now is introduced a new packaging model for our SaaS offering. The first is for the frequent users and named user entitlement model. So, for example, Martin, in the back of the room, I'm calling you out.

13:10 He's my expert user. He needs access to the the the most expanded offering of Korea. So we'll call that Korea design. Advanced Professional. But he's also my manufacturing individual. He may also be my simulation person. He's a person of all traits. So I'm going to assign Martin that named user entitlement of Creo design, advanced professional. And Martin knows that, hey, I have that license today.

13:40 Frankly, I'm going to have it tomorrow. I'm going to have it for the duration of my involvement in the company. So I've assigned it to him. Now. I would assign Niall another license entitlement if he's a frequent user. At the same time, though, because Martin also deals with manufacturing and simulation, I'm also going to tie a named user extension to Martin as well, so that Martin knows that if I start and stop Kryo and I restart it, I have the tools I need to do my job Now for the infrequent user again,

14:13 once or twice a week, what have you. You know, we want to have a shared pool of licenses. It doesn't make sense that a license is tied to yourself if you're only using it once a week. It's not cost effective for me to do that. So I'm going to assign you and frankly, I could assign many users that shared entitlement. You'll grab it when you need it, and then when you're done, it'll be released. But you'll have it locked for a 24 hour period. But once that 24 hours is done, then Niall could go grab it if that's the case. So it's shared amongst many users where again,

14:45 the named user entitlements a 1 to 1 relationship. But we'll also offer a whole set of floating options and give or take. There's roughly 50 of them. Those will be available and accessed by either the frequent or the infrequent user as needed. Grabbed released in a current session of Rio. And those can be certainly used amongst the individuals. But this is the packaging model based on our understanding of how industry is introducing SaaS offerings.

15:15 Our analysis of how our users are using the product, are they frequent or infrequent? And and again, this this is something that we've introduced to a number of beta customers to try and adopt. It is a change, but I think it's a change for the better in how you administer your license within your organization. Okay. Just as an example, just to give you a little screenshot here, this is a view of the admin portal where now what I'm doing is I have some users added into the admin portal.

15:46 I'm the admin and now I'm simply going to assign, in this case, Alex Fisher specific license to run and license extensions. Those are now assigned to him as an individual. Then what I want to do is create a profile in this case called engineering. I'm going to add specific users that are coming with their own given licenses, and then I can start to define specific configurations for engineering. I can use a Unk path, I can use an explicit drive, or more importantly, I can use one drive as a means to distribute that once that assignment,

16:20 in this case to these users, to the group called engineering with a configuration. And then I could tie some floating options to that specific profile. In this case, engineering users will receive an invitation. Now, as a user in this case, Alex Fisher will log in to the portal with his own criteria. He download the the control center that will install a small utility on his machine. He will then, once it's installed, he'll authenticate in it because he does have now a registered username and password.

16:52 Once he authenticates into that, the control center will be active in his taskbar at the bottom right. But more importantly now it is a connection to Atlas. Well, what does that mean? It knows now that Alex is logged in. It knows that Alex has been given these entitlements. It knows Alex is part of this specific profile in the case engineering. And so what's going to happen now is Crio is going to automatically be deployed to him based on the entitlements he was given and no more and no less.

17:24 So it's a perfect install based on his entitlement. He could then start up crio in this case and be able to run it. So it's really optimized for installation, an actual install of Creole plus today. I can have it done in two minutes. It's quite quite over. Quite amazing to see. And frankly, and Brian Thompson jokes about this, he goes I'm never going back to on prem Creo plus in his ability to get access to Creo is is done in seconds.

17:55 More importantly, as updates come out and we'll be releasing updates every quarter the control center that that utility that's installed is going to be aware of that and it'll actually do the update automatically for you. So you as an admin or your end users really have to do nothing, go to bed, wake up in the morning and it's a new build. Okay. As far as details, you're always on the latest release. Creo is always on the latest release. I can't stress that enough.

18:25 There's not an option to say, Hey, can I have the build from three months ago? The answer is no. It is always going to be on the latest release as a release, a new build. We are looking at a three month duration, so we are going to release a build of Creo every three months while that build. In this case, Build X is out there. We're actually already working on build Y or the next the next bill that's going to be deployed. We understand and respect your concern. And again, if I go speak to the administrators, they're like.

18:57 The reasons why we don't go to a new release is because we need to qualify. We need to go through test sequences. We need to evaluate to make sure it solves our purpose. And so we understand that. So when I say we are or you are going to move to the latest release, we will give you a period of time to evaluate that next build. So in this case, as we're working on build Y, and once that's done, we're going to give you a four week early visibility. So as an admin, I can say, okay, I want to validate this next build.

19:31 I'm going to say, okay, Henoc, you're a validator, Nittany, you're a validator through the control center. It'll update you to that new build that preview of the next build, and you can go through your test sequences. When you're done, you just switch it in the control center back to production and you'll go back to build X. But this gives you an ability to evaluate. If there are issues, log a call with tech support. Our development team will evaluate those issues. We'll fix them. We'll send out an updated patch.

20:01 The control center is able to update automatically with those changes, you as a user have to do nothing. Once it's ready and we reach a level of quality and it meets all the standards and criteria, we'll push it out to all users and then all users will now move to build y. In the case of this illustration, while build Y is out there, we're working on Build Z and it'll go through that same process over and over. The new builds that come out will contain bug fixes. Absolutely.

20:32 Obviously, as we've done in past mayors, but it'll also introduce new enhancements. This is the concept of an agile continuous development solution. You don't have to wait a year to get new capabilities. As these builds go out, those will be exposed to you and you can take advantage of them. Okay. But again, I want to stress, you have time to evaluate. And again, if there are issues, we will fix them before we we deploy, but we will definitely evaluate before we push it out to all that.

21:05 It reaches a level of criteria and quality so that you can be reassured that the solution that will be pushed to all your users meets the highest level of standards. The next is we want to jump into collaboration. Obviously, this is what Jim showed and Niall will talk a little bit about collaboration for you. Thanks, Mark. We got a little glimpse of this in Jim's keynote and I think if you attended Paul and Brian's session earlier today, they touched upon it a little more. But I want to do a little bit of a deeper dive on what collaboration is like. Mark mentioned with us today,

21:36 we have the control center and the other exciting piece of it is real time collaboration. So essentially with X+ , we're introducing the ability for not just yourself but multiple users to enter a collaboration session within X+ work together, make design changes, enhance the product, bring more users into the early development phase, and have all of those changes synchronized automatically in real time. You know, leveraging the benefits of the cloud, obviously, and leveraging richer communication with with your entire organization. Right?

22:09 So with real time collaboration, it's not just users within your organization, but you can also invite partners, vendors. You can bring any user that is on X+ into your collaboration session. That way you're kind of bringing other stakeholders downstream or not into your early design process, gathering all of that feedback and making changes within that collaboration session. Essentially, you know, the aim here is to get be more efficient with your design and eventually reach a faster time to market, right?

22:39 So what are the components of these collaboration sessions in X+ ? So you'll have the ability to create sessions specific to projects. So let's say I want to go design an aircraft wing. I can create a collaboration session specific for that project. So you can have unlimited collaboration sessions depending on what you're working on you. You also have the ability to branch off right? As part of a collaborative design workflow. You'd expect that I want to jump into a design,

23:09 but I don't want to commit to that design. I want to explore a few options. I want to create some iterations. I want to branch off and have some options that I can then merge back. So you'll have the ability to create branches. And I'll go into a demo of this in a few minutes, but you'll have the ability to branch off, create those changes, assess how they are and merge them back into your main design. And while you're branching, you know anyone on Main is not affected, right? They can continue to make changes to the design, but you can merge all of those branch changes back into the main.

23:41 If you're happy with them. You also have the ability to share that session. Like I said, with other users, you'll have notifications. If there are conflicts, if there are issues, you'll be you'll be able to, you know, make changes to that. You'll be able to take control. And you can also have everyone updated with with the information that's needed as part of a collaboration session. So like I said, it's real time synchronization so I can go in and make a change. And if there's someone else in that session with me,

24:11 they will see those changes almost immediately. Once it saves that change, it gets propagated to everyone's session. Again, you have enhanced telemetry and analytics. So as an admin in X+ , you can go in, you can understand what your users, how your users are using collaboration, what are the projects, where are they accessing collaboration from, how long certain projects take, and so on. Again, the benefits obviously with concurrent design are that you bring in everyone, all stakeholders into your design process, have all of that feedback immediately,

24:42 the real time updates and of course the ability to validate your design and bring that back into your main. So having said that, let's jump into a quick demo on a two person collaboration session. So I'm going to walk through this with Mark, and I set up a session when he was in Canada and I was in the US sort of just assembling, working on a simple assembly. So. Yeah. So if you look at the session on the right, you can see that I've gone in, I've created a collaboration session,

25:12 I've given it a name and that shows up on the model tree. Right. So now I can go in and I can add data, whether it's from windchill or whether it's from disk. In this example, I've added a check valve. Now I can go in, I can invite Mark to that session. Right. So he gets to see in his career portal the number of sessions that he's either created or has access to. So I've gone in, I can I understand that he's a user in my organization and I've invited my session with Mark. So once he jumps into that session,

25:42 he has access to the exact same data that I had uploaded to the session, because once I added data to the collaboration session that gets uploaded onto Atlas and everyone in that session has access to that data. So at this point, we both are here and you can see there's a collaboration graph that sort of is a timeline of your design. So through the through the collaboration graph, you can see every change that gets synced into the session. At this point on the right, I've gone in, I've made a change, I'm assembling a plug into the design. And while I'm working on that, you can see that in the model tree that it's locked off for other users.

26:14 So in this case, Mark can't make changes to the assembly as long as I'm updating that plug. Once that plug is in, it syncs to Mark's session as well. And if there were three or more users, you would see that it would sync to all of them. So now obviously collaboration, you know, all of us want to make changes at the same time. So in this example, you know, Mark's gone in, he's creating a flange through a user defined feature. While on the right I am making changes to to one of the pillars on that check valve. So you'll see that, you know, as we're making changes together,

26:44 Mark's making changes on the left and I'm making the changes on the right. These are all collected and created as changes on that collaboration graph. So you can already see that, you know, the flange that Mark put in will now appear in the session on the right and both of us have the reduced dimensions of that pillar as well. So I was I was mentioning branching earlier and, you know, in this case, Mark's going to create a version because we've reached a milestone milestone in the design where it's sort of stable and you want to try out some iterations, right? So Mark's going to go in and he's going to create a version and branch off

27:16 so that he can run a simulation study on that check valve. Meanwhile, I'm still on the main branch, so any other user that's not on that created branch will continue to make changes to the design and not be affected by that branch. So as Mark's creating a simulation study, I've gone ahead, I'm making changes to the flange in main. Obviously these changes won't propagate to the person on the branch so Mark can continue to run a simulation. In this case, he's trying to see where the stresses are at and he understands that

27:46 the stresses are higher toward the body. So he's going to make changes on the branch just to see if he can reduce some of those stresses. Meanwhile, I've committed some changes on the main branch and I can continue to work on the design without being affected by the simulation. So Mark goes in, he goes into the body, he makes a diameter change to reduce some of those stresses. So the advantage here is that. You can go into that branch, you can assess the changes, you can compare what was changed on the branch.

28:16 And if you like those changes, you want to commit those back, you can merge those changes back into your into the main branch. That way you're sort of converging the design you've gone through, making iterations on the branch and you want to bring them and commit them back into your main branch so you can go ahead. In this case, you see on the right, I'll go on ahead and I'll merge those changes. So now you can see that I'm comparing over there, but you can see that I can merge those changes back into the main branch. Essentially what this does is that, you know, it allows you the opportunity to go off and explore your design

28:48 and still understand if there have been any conflicts within with the main branch and with the other branches as well. So the system would understand if there was a conflict. In this case there wasn't because we were working on completely different parts. But if there was, it would give you the opportunity to assess those conflicts as well and make those changes. At any point in the design, you can go back, you can activate a much earlier change and you can see how far you've come in that the progress of that design timeline. So once everything is merged, we're back to working on the latest and greatest version of the design.

29:19 So in this case, it's just the two of us, but we're always working on the latest and greatest as long as we're on the same branch. Yeah. So that that was a quick demo of collaboration. I'd love to deep dive a little more, but in case you are interested, you can come down to the booth where we are running some demos as well and we're happy to answer any questions and show a little more in terms of how the branching works and so on. So felt it prudent to go a little into windshield compatibility. We do support on prem windshield.

29:50 You know, it's not just windshield plus, you know, obviously we want our customers to go to the journey of plus solutions both for Korea and windshield and get to that bottom right coordinate but we will support on prem windshield as of today you do need to be on at least a version of windshield of 1202 or 12.1 up to 13. And hopefully that gives enough time for you to certainly evaluate the value of windshield plus and the benefits that it provides

30:21 and then being able to move in that direction as well and being able to support both Korea and windshield in the SaaS environment. Okay. But again, I want to stress, you don't need to move to windshield plus to use Creole Plus again, you can leverage the on prem versions of windshield. Lastly, just to finish up, as I said, this is a journey. This is not done as of May 10th. That's what you get and that's all you get. This is a journey going forward. So while Creo plus now is out in the market,

30:51 we're starting to work on the next builds that will be distributed. And there are enhancements, feedback investments from the beta users that participated have actually aided into providing new enhancements that will come out in the next several builds of Creole Plus. But we are starting to also look at future capabilities that really will new services that will provide value to you. You know, the 1st May be managing your configurations in Atlas, your sups,

31:21 your pros, your template what have you. Being able to assign those to profiles, assign those to users and have them deployed. Expanded innovation, new enhancements being introduced, not just bug fixes or enhanced telemetry for administrators to look at historic usage of the product. But the big one probably is which I left last, is streaming today. It's a thick client. In the future we'll offer both thick and a streaming client. So based on your needs, based on your user's requirements, they could run that from anywhere, any time, from any device,

31:53 or use a traditional laptop and desktop workstation as a thick client. In the future, we'll continue to push areas around managing customizations, your toolkit, application partner applications in Atlas and be able to assign them through a catalog of sorts, but then also pushing towards government certifications Fedramp Govcloud so that our friends at the DOD and other restricted environments can also take advantage of this.

32:24 With that, again, thank you for your attention. I hope you learned a lot from what is available today. What will be available tomorrow in the areas of our plus offering of Creole? And if you have any questions, like Nicole said, please, you know, I guess maybe we could take some time or is there anything after this, do you know? Okay, then why don't we do this? Either I'll stay down here, and if you want to come up and ask some questions

32:57 or if you want to come down to the booth where we have live demonstrations, again, we can go through that and answer those questions. Now. Again, thank you all and enjoy the rest of your time here at Works.