Interoperability: The Key to Collaboration.

Manufacturing today requires a highly collaborative product creation environment to enable innovative and competitive products to be brought to market rapidly. The need for collaboration, or getting the necessary resources on board to simultaneously plan and complete a project and be the first to market, has caused the mechanical design process to shift. Globalization, the Internet, and ever-increasing competitive pressures are driving manufacturers to seek and improve collaboration more than ever before--at all levels--between engineers, departments, suppliers, and even between companies that compete one day and collaborate the next.

The challenge today in manufacturing is to create a highly integrated, real-time data-sharing product creation environment that is cost efficient, easily supportable and scalable, and does not sacrifice information security, data integrity, or user responsiveness. But the primary impediments to implementing collaborative environments are the closed software architectures and proprietary data formats of today's systems.

Indeed, users of product creation technology liken the pursuit of interoperability to that for the Holy Grail. It's typical for a manufacturer today to outsource the design of its products to external firms that use different CAD systems and therefore deliver surface data that cannot be edited by the manufacturer's own system. This means the manufacturer must manually recreate the data, wasting precious time and resources. This delay is incurred for every product revision initiated.

Users of product creation technology have long implored solutions providers to open their systems. It now seems that interoperability is finally starting to win more than lip service from product-creation solution providers, after years of foot-dragging. At the same time, some independent startups appear poised to help users overcome what many view as the vendors' lock on their data.

PTC, UGS, and Spatial all unveiled initiatives this year, suggesting that interoperability, perhaps for the first time, is on the minds of vendors and users in equal measure. Particularly noteworthy was PTC's launch of Granite One, a licensable software development environment built on Pro/Engineer's core geometry, features, graphics, and data-exchange capabilities. What's groundbreaking about Granite One is that it is designed for exchange not just of geometry but also of model intelligence at the feature level--something not provided by traditional merchant modeling kernels. Granite One is meant to enable full bidirectional native-file interchange among CAD systems and applications built on Granite One, which includes Pro/Engineer 2001. While initial adopters will principally be developers of Pro/E-complementary applications such as Moldflow Corp., Granite One's first licensee, PTC says it would be willing to license the technology even to direct competitors, providing they reciprocate.

Also striking was an agreement between UGS's Parasolid line of business and Dassault Systemes' Spatial subsidiary to enhance interoperability between UGS's Parasolid and Spatial's ACIS, the two market-leading merchant modeling kernels. UGS Parasolid and Spatial agreed to exchange licenses for their respective modeling technologies and to work to improve interoperability between the two kernels. Also, Spatial will provide UGS Parasolid with data translators for standard and proprietary CAD formats including IGES, STEP, and Catia.

The move follows UGS's recent rebranding in which it evolved its corporate identity and product portfolio to better reflect its expanded ability to support collaborative commerce for manufacturers--an expansion punctuated by its acquisition of EAI. Key elements of UGS's interoperability strategy are the Parasolid XT and eXT formats for precise geometry transfer, EAI's visualization and DMU technology and data formats for ...