Digital transformation? Let’s talk.

Digital transformation? Let’s talk.

May 20, 2022 | Hot Topics

Digital transformation? Let’s talk. I was at Autodesk’s Accelerate conference in New Orleans earlier this week. Many great speakers talked about how they are adapting to the realities they find themselves in—demanding customers, changing supply chains, squeezed...
Hot guitar riffs & cool announcements from PTC Live

Hot guitar riffs & cool announcements from PTC Live

Jun 23, 2013 | Hot Topics

PTC has spent the last, well, decade redefining itself. For a long time, it was the feature-based modeling powerhouse in a direct-modeling CAD world. Then it decided CAD was passé and devoted itself to building a PLM platform. Most recently, PTC entered the brave new...
CD-adapco: physics, usability & performance

CD-adapco: physics, usability & performance

Apr 3, 2013 | Hot Topics

CAE user conferences, for me, are all about fighting to understand. I’m an engineer but not a scientist, so I’m usually OK in these very technical presentations until the equations start flying. Then I can easily veer off-track as I try to figure out...

Report from Nashville: #SEU12

Jun 18, 2012 | Hot Topics

Overheard last week at Solid Edge University: Customer: ‘This is the best assembly environment I’ve seen.’ Solid Edge guy: ‘Here’s what we’re doing to make it better.’ A lot of similar conversations took place last week at...

For PTC, “interesting” = “good”

Jun 8, 2012 | Hot Topics

A couple of months ago, I wrote that “PTC is such an interesting company. A bunch of really smart people who … get too far ahead of their customers (remember “CAD is dead”?), alienate those who sign the checks while retaining intense loyalty among the user...

Altair, buses and astronauts

Jun 7, 2012 | Hot Topics

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the 2012 Americas edition of Altair’s HyperWorks Technology Conference. Over 800 people heard Altair; T.K. Mattingly of Apollo 13 and Apollo 16 fame and a NASA Space Shuttle pilot; Luca Pignacca, chief...

COFES 2012: Clouds in the desert

Apr 18, 2012 | Hot Topics

COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, takes place in the Arizona desert each April. Usually, the sun is glorious, the birds sing, the rabbits hop and the 300 or so attendees scurry between sessions and meetings, with the occasional pause by a pool...

CD-adapco: Bikes, cars and so much more

Apr 3, 2012 | Hot Topics

Did you know that the weight of a bicycle becomes relevant only when the grade of the road you’re riding on is 8% or higher? The bike’s aerodynamics come into play on flats, uphills and downhills and, it turns out, have a significantly greater impact on a...
10 takeaways from SWW12

10 takeaways from SWW12

Feb 21, 2012 | Hot Topics

SolidWorks World 2012 started off last week with NAO (pronounced “now”) — an utterly adorable 57 cm (just under 2 feet) tall robot from Aldebaran that that seems almost human — breakdancing on screen and on the stage. And it only got better from there. I...