Microsoft and UGS Announce Alliance

By DE Editors

Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, WA) and UGS Corp.(Plano, TX) announced a multiyear alliance they, the companies says, is intended to change how organizationscreate products by delivering the full suite of UGS product lifecyclemanagement (PLM) software solutions on the Microsoft platform.According to a UGS press release, the alliance will help UGS deliverits PLM technology on the Microsoft platform to give manufacturers theability to create and manage all their product data in an easy-to-useand secure environment while allowing global team members, customers,industry partners, and vendors to participate in the creative process.

By building on existing technology investments from Microsoft andleveraging the PLM expertise of UGS, both alliance partners say they expect toempower customer employees to collaborate, expedite decision-making,and increase efficiency by getting products to market faster. Asmanufacturers realize the competitive advantage of collaborative PLMsolutions, the PLM market is expected to show a five-year compoundannual growth rate of 9 percent, growing from $9.7 billion to $15billion, according to a recent AMR research report.

It is expected that by optimizing for the Microsoft platform in today’sglobal economy, manufacturers will deliver greater customer valuethrough solutions that are easy to use, deploy, and maintain withreduced ownership and integration costs.

“Microsoft’s investment in enterprise scalability and UGS’ rapidadoption of Microsoft’s platform will enable our joint customers toincrease the quality and quantity of more secure connections withtrading partners around the world to speed time to market and realizethe full benefit of PLM,” said Tony Affuso, chairman, CEO, andpresident of UGS, in a press statement.

As part of the agreement, Microsoft will work with UGS in itsdevelopment of PLM software using a broad range of current and futureMicrosoft products, including Microsoft.NET, Visual Studio 2005,ASP.NET 2.0, Windows Server 2003, and Microsoft SQL Server 2005. UGSTeamcenter software and Velocity Series portfolio, which currently runon both the Windows client and Windows Server platforms, will beenhanced for the Microsoft platform to better serve the needs of thecompanies’ mutual customers in engineering and manufacturing industries.

For more information, visit ugs.com.

Sources: Press materials received from the company. Additional information gleaned from the companies websites.