Teamcenter update – still going strong
Teamcenter 2007 was launched at the end of 2007 and has continued the market leadership that was established years ago. Bill Boswell started with a business overview which included the highlight that there have been more than 4 million seats of Teamcenter delpoyed around the world, far more than any other PDM/PLM product.
Steve Bashada then took the stage to give an update on the strategy and technology. He started out by making the point that the common backbone of all the Archimedes product deliverables is Teamcenter. 
It will be the common back bone for all data and process data. Steve went on to give a preview of the capabilities of Teamcenter 8 (I guess year based product names are loosing favor) using a 3 layer diagram showing an industry layer on top, an application layer in the middle (including things like portfolio, program and project management, MRO, Reporting and Analytics), and a core of Visualization, Extensibility Services and Knowldge Foundation. The focus of Teamcenter 8 is solidifying the capabilities of the indsutry layer: adding more capabilities through standard industry templates. Focus industries are Aerospace and Defense, Automotive, CPG, Government, High Tech Electronics, FDA and Retail / Apparel.
Our goal is to be dominant in the industries in which we compete.
Next Steve talked about the Teamcenter release cadence. For the unified architecture, Teamcenter 8 arrives in calendar Q4, followed by Teamcenter 8.1 in calendar Q2 of 2009 and then Teamcenter 9 in calendar Q2 of 2010. For Teamcenter Engineering there will be a Teamcenter 8 release followed by maintenance packs. Customers on Teamcenter Engineering will be able to easily transition to the unified architecture anytime at or after the release of Teamcenter 8. For Teamcenter Enterprise there will be a release at Teamcenter 8.1 and then 18 months after that.
Steve then discussed the services offered to help customers schedule deployments and transitions. Its pretty clear that customers are the focus. Extending the theme to the investment plan, Steve talked about core platform improvements, specifically focused on performance and stability. Steve emphasized the point that the core platform is truly the foundation of everything else and thus the reason for the constant focus in improvements. Another investment area is integrated requirements management that links requirements to any part of a BOM. A third area is integrated visualization, that has become even more pervasive and displayed in the context of the workflow. The investment theme discussion concluded with a few points on Teamcenter CAD integrations, including NX and CATIA up to and including v6.
Teamcenter BOM, a specialized product designed to syncronize the physical and virtual bill of materials has been deployed at 2 major automotive OEMs: GM and SAIC. There are more than 10 opportunities being pursued at other OEMs. Expanding out to other applications areas, Steve touched on integration with process planning applications, MRO applications, and simulation data management applications.
Steve concluded with a demonstration of a new visual navigation technique that will allow a user to quickly move back and forth from visualization to structured data in PLM. The key difference between this and other similar techniques is that link which is key to actually making something that is cool looking really productive.
All in all the breadth and depth of Teamcenter really shines through when you get an hour long fly over from Bill and Steve. Amazing what it can do and what our customers are doing with it.
